Quiet Talks on Service by S. D. Gordon

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If the call is clear go ahead. Need is one of the strong calling voices of
God. It is always safe to respond. Put _out_ your foot in the answering
swing, even though you cannot see clearly the place to put it _down_. God
attends to that part. Power comes _as we go_.

The Parting Message.

Just now I want to talk with you a bit about the last one of these
commissions, the Olivet commission. I do not know just what day it was
given or at what hour. But I have thought it was in the twilight of a
Sabbath evening. There's a yellow glow of light filling all the western
sky running along the broken line of those hills yonder, and through the
trees, and in upon this group of men standing.

Here in full view lies little Bethany fragrant with memories of Jesus'
power. Over yonder, those tree tops down in a bit of valley with the
brook--that is _Gethsemane_. And farther over there is the fortress city
of _Jerusalem_. And just outside its wall is the bit of a knoll called
_Calvary_. Here under these trees every night that last week of the
tragedy Jesus had slept out in the open, with His seamless coat wrapped
about Him. This is the spot He chooses for the good-by word. It is full of
most precious, fragrant memories.

Here is the man who has been Simon, but out of whom a new man was coming
these days, Peter, the man of rock. And here are John and James, sons of
fire and of thunder, sons of their mother. And there, little Scotch
Andrew. At least our Scotch friends seem to have adopted him as their very
own. And close by his side is his friend with the Greek name, Philip. And
here the man to whom Jesus paid the great tribute of naming him the
guileless man.

And the others, not so well known to us, but very well known to Jesus, and
to be not a whit less faithful than their brothers these coming days. But
somehow as you look you are at once irresistibly drawn past these to
_Him_--the Man in the midst. The Man with the great face, torn with the
thorns, and cut with the thongs, but shining with a sweet, wondrous,
beauty light.

It is the last time they are together. He is going away; coming back soon,
they understand. They do not know just how soon. But meanwhile in His
absence they are to be as He Himself would be if He remained among men.
They are to stand for Him. And so with eyes fixed on His face they look,
and listen, and wonder a bit, just what the last word will be.

What would you expect it to be? It was the good-by word between men who
were lovers, dearest friends. The tenderest thing would be said and the
most important. The one going away would speak of that which lay closest
down in His own heart. And whatever He might say would sink deepest into
their hearts, and control their action in the after days.

He had been talking to them very insistently, about an hour before, down
in the city, about _waiting there_ until the Holy Spirit came upon them.
And that word has fastened itself into their minds with newly sharpened
hooks of steel points. Now He talks about their being His witnesses, here
at home among their own folks, and out among their half-breed Samaritan
neighbors, whom they didn't like, and then--with eyes looking yearningly
out and finger pointing steadily out--to the farthest reach of the planet.
And now, as He is about to go, this is the word that comes from those
lips:

"All power hath been given unto Me.
Therefore go ye,
And make disciples of all nations."

A Secret Life of Prayer.

There are four things in that good-by word. Three are directly spoken, and
one is not spoken, but directly implied. First is this, your chief work is
to win men. That is directly said. The second is implied--it is the
toughest task you ever undertook. That is implied in this that it will
take more power than they have. A power that only He has. A supernatural
power. And we all know how true that is. Of all luggage man is the hardest
to move. He _won't_ move unless he _will_. Every man of us that has ever
tried to change somebody's else purpose knows how impossible it is unless
by the inward pull. You simply _cannot_ without the man's consent. The
third thing is this: I have all the power needed. The fourth this: _You_
go.

And the Master meant to tell them, and to tell us, this: that a man should
lead a triple life, three lives in one. We sometimes hear of a man leading
a double life in a bad sense. In a good sense, every one of us should be
living a triple life, three distinct lives in one. The first of these
three lives is this: _a secret life, lived with Jesus, hidden from the
eyes of men_. An inner life of closest contact with Him, that the outside
folks know nothing about.

Notice again the four statements in that good-by word. Your chief concern
is to win men. It is the toughest task you ever undertook: it will take
supernatural power. I have all the power you need. Instinctively you feel
as though the fourth thing should be, "I will go." That would seem to be
the logical conclusion. "No," Jesus says, "_you go_." Plainly if we are to
do something taking supernatural power, and we haven't any such power of
ourselves, there must be the closest kind of contact with the source of
power. The man who is to go must be in the most intimate contact with the
Man who has the powers needed in the going.

And this is simply a law of all life, given to us here by life's greatest
Philosopher. The seen depends upon the secret always. The outer keys upon
the inner. The life that men see depends wholly upon the life that only
the Master sees. David had power to slay the lion and bear in secret, away
from the gaze of men, before he had power to slay the giant before the
wondering eyes of two nations. The closet becomes the swivel of the
street.

In crossing the ocean there are two great dangers to be dreaded and
guarded against, aside from the storms that may arise. The greater of
these is an abandoned ship. One that through some stress of storm has been
left by the sailors in the attempt to save their lives. It is most
dangerous because it sends no warning ahead of its presence. In crossing
the Atlantic by the more northern routes the other danger is from the
icebergs that may be met in the steamer's path. If a fog obscure the
lookout the boat is slowed down, and a man kept busy with line and
thermometer taking the temperature of the water. The iceberg is kindlier
than the derelict, in the chill it sends out. The presence of the danger
can so be detected, and measures taken to avoid it.

But the great danger here is not simply in the huge mountain of ice that
you see looming up against the sky, great as that is. It is in the unseen
ice. Hidden away below is a mountain of ice twice as large and heavy as
that seen above the water's surface. The danger lies in the terrific force
of a blow from this hidden pile that would crush the strongest steel
steamer, as I might crush an egg-shell in my fingers.

We all admire the beauty of the trees that rear their heads, and send out
their branches, and make the world so beautiful with their soft green
foliage. But have you thought of the twin tree, the unseen tree that
belongs to these we see? For every tree that grows up and out with its
beauty and fruit there is another. The twin tree goes down and out.

Sometimes, as far as this we see goes _up_, the other goes _down_; as far
as the branches go out so far do the underneath branches go out,
sometimes farther. This unseen tree is ever busy drawing moisture, and
food from the soil and sending it, ceaselessly sending it, up to the upper
tree. The beauty and fruitfulness above are because of this secret life of
the tree.

I remember as a boy going to the bathroom in our home one day to draw some
water. But none came. There were a few drops, and some sputtering--there's
very apt to be sputtering when there is nothing else--but no flow of
water. And I wondered why. Soon I found that the main pipe in the street
was being fixed, and the water had been cut off at the curb. There was
water in the pipe clear from the curbstone up to the spigot, but I could
not get it because the reservoir connection under the ground had been
turned off.

I have met some people since then that made me think of that. There is a
reservoir of water, clear and sweet, with which they have had connection,
and are supposed still to have. But when some thirsty body comes up for a
bit of refreshment, there's some sputtering, some noise, may be a few
stray drops--but no more. And folks seem thirstier because they were
expecting a cool, satisfying drink that never came.

I think I know why it is so. The secret connection with the reservoir has
been tampered with. There _must_ be the secret contact with Jesus
cultivated habitually if there is to be a sweet, strong outer life. And
not cultivated by hothouse methods. Such plants won't stand the chilly air
outside the glass-house. Cultivated by natural, simple contact with Jesus,
over His Word, habitually, until everything comes under the influence of
that secret life.

One day a man was standing on a busy downtown thoroughfare in Cleveland
waiting for a car. There was a thick, dirty wire hanging down from the
cross arm high up of the wire pole. He happened to stop there. And
absorbed in thought, he mechanically put out his hand and took hold of the
wire. Instantly a look of intense agony came into his face. His arm, and
whole body began twisting and writhing. Then he fell to the ground
lifeless. The dirty-looking wire had direct connections with the
power-house. It was throbbing with a strong current. It was a "live" wire.

Some men who have seemed quite unattractive in the light of some modern
standards have been found on touch to be charged with a life current of
tremendous power. And some others, outwardly more attractive, have been
found to be as powerless as a dead wire. And some there have been, and
are, very winsome and attractive in themselves, and charged with the life
current too. The great thing is the secret connections carefully
maintained with the source of power.

There must be the closest kind of touch with God if His plan through us
for a planet is to carry out. We do not run on the storage battery plan,
but on the trolley plan, or the third rail. There must be constant full
touch with the feed wire or rail. And that "must" should be spelled in
capitals, and printed in red, and triply underscored.

A man _must_ plan for the bit of quiet time daily, preferably in the early
morning, alone with Jesus; with the door shut, the Book open, the spirit
quiet, the mind alert, the knee bent, the will bent too. If it be
resolutely _planned_ for it can be gotten in every life. If not planned
for with a bit of red iron in the will, it will surely slip out. And the
man will surely slip down.

Here is found the spirit in which a man may live all the day long,
wherever his feet may tread, in the fierce competition of trade, or in the
deadly enervation of some society circles. Out of such a man shall
breathe, all unconsciously to himself, an atmosphere fragrant as a
mountain breeze over a field of wild roses. This is the first life Jesus
bids us live.

An Open Life of Purity.

The second life we are to live is the exact reverse of this. It is indeed
the outer side of this: _an open life of purity lived among men for
Jesus_. Note again the logic of that good-by word. Your chief business is
to be down there in the thick of the crowd, winning men out of the dust
and dirt up into a new life of purity. It is the hardest job any man ever
undertook. It is practically impossible unless you have a power quite more
than human. Jesus quietly says, "I have the power that will do it."

Again you feel that He must say next, "_I_ will go." The thing must be
done. It is the one thing worth while. It will require a power we haven't.
_He_ has it. You feel as though _He_ must do the going. "No," He says,
with great emphasis. "_You_ go. You be I; you live my life over again,
down there among men." The "Ye" and "Me" in that sentence are meant to be
interchangeable words.

He is asking us to live His life over again among men. No, it is more than
that. He is asking us to let Him live His life over again in each of us.
The Man with the power that men can't resist would reach out to them
_through us._ He would be touching them in us. Jesus said, "As the Father
hath sent Me, even so send I you." He said again, "He that hath seen Me
hath seen the Father." Jesus embodied the Father to men. He asks us to
take His place and embody Himself to men.

Paul understood this thoroughly. In writing to the friends throughout
Galatia, whom he had won up to Jesus, he says, "I have been crucified
with Christ." There is an old dead "I." "Nevertheless I live." There is a
new living "I." "Yet not I--the old I--but Christ liveth in me." _He_ was
the new I. There was a new personality within Paul. I never weary of
recalling what Martin Luther said about that verse in the comment he made
on Galatians. You remember he said, "If somebody should knock at my
heart's door, and ask who lives here, I must not say 'Martin Luther lives
here.' I would say 'Martin Luther--is--dead--Jesus--Christ--lives--here.'"

I wonder if any of us has ever been taken for Jesus. I wonder if anybody
has ever _mistaken_ any of us for Him. You remember, He used to move among
men after the resurrection, and while they would feel the gentle
winsomeness of His presence and talk, they did not recognize Him. Has
somebody run across you or me sometime, and been with us a little while,
and then gone away saying to himself, "I wonder if that was Jesus back
again in disguise. He seemed so much like what I think Jesus must have
been--I wonder."

Well, if it were so, of course we would not be conscious of it. A
Jesus-man is never absorbed in thinking about himself. He is taken up with
Jesus, and with folks. A man is always least conscious of the power of his
own presence and life. Everybody else knows more about it than he does.
Plainly this is the Master's plan for each of us. And more, it is the
result when He is allowed free sway.

The controlling principle of His life was to please His Father. The
pervading purpose and passion was to win men out and up. The
characteristics of His life were purity, unselfishness, sympathy, and
simplicity. We are to be as He. He was the Father to all the race of men.
Each of us is to be Jesus to his circle.

Please notice I'm not talking about lips just now but about lives. The
life is the indorsement of the lips. It makes the words of the lips more
than they sound or seem. Or, it makes them less, sometimes pitiably less,
little more than a discount clerk ever busily at work. The words ever go
to the level of the life, up or down. Water seeks its level persistently.
So do one's words, and they find it more quickly than the water, for they
go _through_ all obstructions. And the life is the leveler of the words,
up or down.

So far as this second life is concerned a man's lips might be sealed, and
his tongue dumb, but his life in its purity and simplicity, its
unselfishness and sympathetic warmness will ever be spelling out Jesus.
And He will be spelled out so big and plain that the man hurriedly
running, or lazily creeping, or half blind in a cloud of dust, will be
stopping and reading. If there were but more re-incarnations of Jesus how
folks would be coming a-running to Him.

Do you remember that prayer in blank verse of the old Scottish preacher
and poet and saint, Horatius Bonar? He said:

"Oh, turn me, mould me, mellow me for use.
Pervade my being with Thy vital force,
That this else inexpressive life of mine
May become eloquent and full of power,
Impregnated with life and strength divine.
Put the bright torch of heaven into my hand,
That I may carry it aloft
And win the eye of weary wanderers here below
To guide their feet into the paths of peace.
I cannot raise the dead,
Nor from this soil pluck precious dust,
Nor bid the sleeper wake,
Nor still the storm, nor bend the lightning back,
Nor muffle up the thunder,
Nor bid the chains fall from off creation's long enfettered limbs.
_But_ I can live a life that tells on other lives,
And makes this world less full of anguish and of pain;
A life that like the pebble dropped upon the sea
Sends its wide circles to a hundred shores.
May such a life be mine.
Creator of true life, Thyself the life Thou givest,
Give Thyself, that Thou mayst dwell in me, and I
in Thee."

An Active Life of Service.

The third life is _a life of active service, of aggressive earnestness in
winning men._ I say aggressive. That word does not mean noise and dust,
shuffling of feet, and bustling confusion. It means rather the steady,
steady movement of the sun which noiselessly, dustlessly, moves onward,
hour after hour, day in and day out, regardless of any storms, or
disturbances. It means the quiet, peaceful, but resistless uninterrupted
movement of the moon rising night after night, and going through its
circle of action. Earnestness means the burning of the inner spirit. Its
fires dim not, for they are fed continually from secret sources.

This third life is spoken of directly: "Go ye and make disciples." The
going is to be continued until folks farthest away have heard. Some people
are bounded by the horizon of the town where they live, some by the
particular church to which they belong, some the denomination, some the
state, or even the nation. Jesus fixes the horizon of His follower as that
of the world. Jesus was visionary. He talked about all nations, a race, a
world.

All are to go. They are to go to all. Some may be made wholly free, by
arrangement with their fellow-followers, to give their full strength and
time to the direct going and telling. These are highly favored in
privilege. Some of these may go to deserted darkened places in the home
land. Some may go to the city slum, which in its dire need is of close kin
to the foreign-mission land. These are yet more highly favored in
privilege.

Some may go to those far distant lands where Jesus is not known, where the
need of Him is so pathetically great. These are the most highly favored in
the privilege of service accorded them. Many others have been left free of
the necessity of earning bread and home and clothing and so have a rare
opportunity of devoting themselves to the going, as the Spirit of Jesus
guides. Many are given the talent to earn easily, and so, if they will,
may give much strength to service.

The great majority everywhere and always are absorbed for most of the
waking hours of the day in earning something to eat, and something to
wear, and somewhere to sleep. Yet where there is the warm touch with Jesus
there will come the yearning for purity, and the life of service. With
these as with all there may be the service, strong and sweetly fragrant.
There is always some bit of spare time, with planning, that can be used in
direct service in church, or school, or mission. And the secret life of
prayer will give a steadiness that will guard against the over-use of
one's strength.

There can be a personal going to some in words tactfully spoken. There is
the life of sweet purity and gentle patience always so winsome, that
speaks all the time in musical tones to one's circle. There is an
enormous, unconscious aggressiveness about such a life. Then there can be
the going through gold. And the entire planet can be brought under one's
thumb of influence through the strangely simple power of prayer.

I have been running across some new versions of this last word of Jesus. A
sort of re-revisions they are. I have not found them in the common print,
but printed in lives, the lives of men. The print is large, chiefly
capitals, easily read. These lives are so noisy as to quite shut out what
the lips may be saying. There are variations in these translations.

Sometime the message is made to read like this: "All power hath been given
unto Me, therefore go ye, and make--coins of gold--oh, belong to church of
course--that is proper and has many advantages--and give too. There are
advantages about that--give freely, or make it seem freely--give to
missions at home and abroad. That is regarded as a sure sign of a liberal
spirit. But be careful about the _proportion_ of your giving. For the real
thing that counts at the year's end is how much you have added to the
stock of dollars in your grasp. These other things are good, but--merely
incidental. This thing of getting gold is the main drive."

Please understand me, I never heard any of these folks talk in this blunt
way with their _tongues_. So far as I can hear, they are saying something
quite different. But what their tongues are saying is made indistinct and
blurred by some noise near by.

Other translations I have run across have this variation: "Make a place
for yourself, in your profession, in society. Make a comfortable
living;--with a wide margin of meaning to that word 'comfortable'--belong
to the church, become a pillar, or at least move in the pillar's circle,
give of course, even freely in appearance, but remember these are the dust
in the scale, the other is the thing that weighs. All of one's energies
must be centered on the main thing."

May I ask you to listen very quietly, while I repeat the Master's own
words over very softly and clearly, so that they may get into the inner
cockles of our hearts anew? "All power hath been given unto Me; therefore
go ye, and _make disciples of all nations_." These other translations are
wrong. They are misleading. _The one main thing is influencing men for
Jesus_.

The Perspective of True Service.

It is not the only thing by any means. There is a multitude of things
perfectly proper and that must be done and well done. But through all
their doing is to run this one strong purpose. These other things are
details, important details, indispensably important, yet details. The
other is the one main thing toward which the doing of all the others is to
bend and blend.

Please mark keenly that there are three lives here; three in one. The
secret life of prayer, the open life of purity, the active life of service
Not one, nor the other, not any two, but all three, this is the true
ideal. This is the true rounded life. And note sharply that this gives the
true perspective of service. The service life grows up out of the other
two. Its roots lie down in prayer and purity. This explains why so much
service is fruitless. It isn't rooted. There is no rich subsoil.

It seems to be a part of the hurt of sin that men do not keep the
proportion of things balanced, and never have. In former days men shut
themselves up behind great walls that they might be pleasing to God. They
shut out the noise that they might have quiet to pray. They thought to
shut out the sin that they might be pure, forgetting that they carried it
in with them.

In our day things have swung clean over to the other extreme. Now all is
activity. The emphasis of the time is upon doing. There is a lot of
running around, and rushing around. There is a great deal of activity that
seems inseparable from dust. The wheels make such a lot of noise as they
go around. _Doing_ that does not root down in the secret touch with
Jesus, may be quite vigorous for a time, but soon leaves behind as its
only memory withered up branches. This is a _practical_ age, we are
constantly told. Things must be judged by the standard of usefulness. That
is surely true, and good, but there is very serious danger that the true
perspective of service be lost in the dust that is being raised.

The imprint of this disproportion or lack of proportion can even be found
in the theological teaching of long ago and now. At one time religion was
defined as having to do with a man's relation to God. That was emphasized
to the utter hiding away of all else. In our own day the swing is clear
over to the other side. Definitions of religion that make everything of
helping one's brother and fellow, are the popular thing. There seems to be
a sort of astigmatism that keeps us from seeing things straight. Though
always there have been those that saw straight and lived truly.

Mark keenly that true touch with God always brings the longing to be pure,
and the loving of one's fellow. The nearer one gets to God the nearer will
he find himself getting to men. Often we find ourselves getting new
wonderful glimpses of God as we are eagerly helping somebody. Up seems to
include out, as though the line that drew us up to God led through men.
Yet with that always goes the other fact that touch with God makes one
long to be alone with Him.

There are always the three turnings of a true life, upward, inward,
outward. Upward to God, inward to self, outward to the world. The more one
knows God the keener is the longing to get off with Himself alone, the
deeper is the yearning to be pure, and the stronger is the passion to help
others regardless of any sacrifice involved.

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