The Lord Reigneth

“But the Lord said unto him, Go thy way: for he is a chosen vessel unto me, to bear my name before the Gentiles, and kings, and the children of Israel.” — Acts ix. 15.

IN the coarser work of breaking up his own way at first, God freely uses the powers of nature and the passions of wicked men; but for the nicer touches near the finishing, he employs more sensitive instruments. A work of righteousness is about to be done upon the person of a Greek jailer at Philippi. Mark the method of the omniscient “Worker. A strong coarse tool he seizes first, and therewith strikes the hard material, with the view of carrying it through a certain preparatory stage; then with an instrument of more ethereal temper and keener edge, which he had previously placed within reach, he completes the process. The earthquake, which shook the foundations of the prison, rent the outer searing of the jailer’s conscience, and made an open path into his soul. In such work the powers of nature could no further go. What an earthquake could not do, God did by a renewed human heart, and gentle, loving human lips. From the same chosen vessel that Ananias had visited at Damascus, the ointment was poured forth which healed the jailer’s wound. “Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved,” said Paul: the rude heathen believed and lived.

Thus God works to-day, both in secret individual conversions and in wide-spread national revivals. Bankruptcies, storms, diseases, wars, are charged to batter down the defences, and then living disciples go in by the breach to convert a kingdom or win a soul. Missionaries seldom begin the work, and providences never complete it. Each kind of instrument is best in its own place and time. Do not go forward without providential openings, lest you should spend your strength for nought; and do not neglect providential openings, lest the lost opportunity should never return.

The inanimate machinery of war, more powerful now than in any former generation, may suffice to break down the walls of the enemy’s stronghold; but these engines that pioneer so powerfully cannot capture the fortress; loyal, living men must enter and take possession in their sovereign s name. This order is adopted in the Christian warfare. Wherever the strife of men or the judgment of God has made an opening, good soldiers of J esus Christ spring in and take possession for their Lord.

Thus, when war and treaties opened China, the Christian Church leaped in. Within those mysterious barriers Christ is now, by his chosen instruments, closing in a decisive struggle with the strong man who for ages has kept his house there in peace. By the rents which the earthquake insurrection has left in the framework of Indian society, our

The Lord reigneth. missionaries may, perhaps, get deeper into the nation’s life than heretofore. In Italy, too, after the thunder and the lightning had done their terrible work, Christians lying on the watch were ready to enter with the still, small word. Already the Man of Sin has been compelled to slacken his grasp, and the land is free. Chosen vessels full of Christ may bear their treasure now through the broken barriers, and pour it out in Italy — pour it out in Rome, the same unchanged treasure that Paul bore long ago to the same place. A long barren night has passed over Italy, but the Word of God liveth and abideth for ever. By the very fact of making openings, God is beckoning for instruments to bring it in.

But the same order prevails and the same laws rule in the minutest scale of individual life. It is not only China, or India, or Italy, that is long closed against Christ, and at last opened by commotions within or assaults from without. This neighbour who has lived long without God in the world, and fenced himself all round against the inroad of serious thoughts, has been shaken as if by an earthquake. It may be the insolvency of a bank, or the death of a brother; it may be the encroachment of disease in his own frame, or the spiritual awakening of sinners near him: it may be any one of these, or of other similar shakings, that makes a breach in the defences, and leaves an opening right through into the soul. Now is the time for those finer instruments which Jesus loves to use. Vessels who bear Christ’s name, bear it in at that opening now. Do not stand and say, We are not great vessels. Little vessels will go more easily in, and little vessels, full of Christ, will do the work there as well as great ones.

Has Christ visited you, brother, and freely taken all your sin away? It shows, you think, that you had need of the

Lord. Yea; but it shows also another thing — that the Lord has need of you.

The apostle Paul occupies a large place in the Bible, in the Church, in history, in heaven. No mere man, before or since, has rilled so great a space in the scheme of Providence, or left his mark so wide and deep upon the world. The gospel is the greatest power that has ever operated on earth, and Paul was its greatest minister.

Considering the tendency to hero-worship, which seems inherent in our fallen nature, there was great danger lest he who stood so far above his fellows should be mistaken for a god. This danger was foreseen and averted in the election and calling of Paul. He who conceived the plan and executed it, hath done all things well. The worshippers of that saint will be put to shame when the Scriptures reveal the hole of the pit whence sovereign mercy dug their idol. The history of Saul’s conversion proclaims more clearly, more loudly, than an angel’s voice, “See thou do it not.”

This most learned doctor of the schools, the Pharisee who scrupulously tithed his mint, and devoutly buckled on his broad phylacteries, was the life and soul of the infuriated gang who shed the blood of Christ’s earliest martyr. The mob executioners got their signal in the glance of his cruel eye. He satiated his own sectarian pride by the murder of the good, and crowned his wickedness by offering the bloody deed as a service done to God. To make an idol of this man, when by free grace he is highly exalted and greatly used, is either impossible or inexcusable. God needed a man to signal the glad tidings so that they might be seen afar; with this view he lifted one up from the lowest place, and set him on the highest. Thus Divine mercy found free scope, and human pride was effectually excluded. Job, though free from idolatry in fact, confessed that “the moon walking in brightness” tempted him to kiss his hand in token of reverence, as if the creature were Divine. But if he had known that moon at first, a mass of impurity lying on the earth and polluting it, and seen it then by God’s hand lifted up, and lighted, and balanced in the sky, he would not have experienced any tendency to worship the once filthy and still feeble thing. All the homage of his heart would have risen spontaneously to the living and true God, who made that lesser light, and hung it in the heaven for the use of men. It is thus that we are kept from unduly reverencing the apostle Paul, although, under the Sun of Righteousness, he is the largest light of our spiritual firmament; for in our sight he was, by mere mercy, lifted from the mire of guilt, and fixed the loftiest and brightest of that cloud of witnesses who receive and reflect the “Light of the world.”