A Personal Word. At Parting

We are about to part. Before we do so, I am most anxious, if it were possible, to buttonhole my reader, and to ask him to come to a decision in regard to the great unsolved problem that is before the Church. In the very first Call to Prayer for the Edinburgh Conference the expression occurred, “The Christian experience ol the Church is not deep, intense, and living enough to meet the world’s need.” In previous chapters of this book quotations have been given from the different speakers, emphasising, especially on the last days of the Conference, the thought that the Church has not the vitality and devotion needed for the tremendous task to which it is called. In the Reports of the Conference, one finds an answer to every possible question in regard to what can be done to carry on the work effectually, with the exception of just this all-important one, how the Church can be lifted up into a fuller spiritual life? One had hoped that the Conference would in direct appeal to the Churches have pressed home the question, and pointed out the path in which the hope of deliverance is to be found. But it did not feel itself called to, and leaves now the unanswered question to the individual conscience of each believer. I make bold to plead with my reader to take up the question, until he realises its tremendous solemnity, and resolve that he at least will yield himself a living sacrifice for God to use for that great work. I would ask every child of God carefully to consider the following points: —

i. Will you not take time and thought and prayer to come under the full sense of the terrible position? Twothirds of the world still without the knowledge of Christ. The Church created, and set apart, and endued with the Spirit, with the one object of making Christ known to every human being without delay. The great majority of Christians utterly in different, a considerable number apparently willing to help, but utterly unconscious of the urgency of the need, or the solemn responsibility resting upon them. A very small number seeking at any cost to yield themselves to fulfil their Lord’s command. God in heaven holding His omnipotence at the disposal of the faith and prayer of His people, but hindered by their unbelief. And Christ the Lord grieved, oh, so grieved, because His love is so little known and honoured by His people, and so little made known to those whom it longs to reach.

I ask you, will you not turn aside from the world and from men, to take up this burden of the Lord, and wait upon God to see if He cannot use you to help His Church to some right sense of shame and contrition for all this sinful neglect? I know of no other way of restoration, than a beginning made by individual men and women pleading on behalf of the Church with God, and pleading on behalf of God with men. I plead with you, pointedly and personally, will you not be one?

2. You may feel as if you yourself have not the enthusiasm or the faith for such an undertaking. You are not conscious that you have power with God as an intercessor. You fear that you may not be faithful in fulfilling your vow, or in yourself attaining that more abundant life to which you are asked to help to lift up the Church.

I beseech you, do not give way to such thoughts. What is needed is just this one thing: Are you willing to yield yourself up to God for His Holy Spirit to get entire possession of you? This is surely what every Christian ought to seek. Read Chapter XII., on the “Promise of the Father.” Give time and heart to meditate on the wonderful mysteries: the Holy Spirit of God given to fill you with a Divine life; the heavenly Father inconceivably willing to bestow the gift; the blessed Lord ready to teach you to pray and to lead you in the path which

He went, through the death of the Cross to the fulness of the Spirit; and your prayer that can work the mighty wonder and bring the fulness of the Spirit. Just take Christ’s lesson of a simple childlike confidence trusting a father, and the importunate persistency pleading with a friend, and prove God if He will not pour out a blessing. Oh, remember, if you fail, you will be keeping open the path in which others fail too. If you be strong and of good courage, God will assuredly use you to help others.

I know no solution of the tremendous problem, how the Church is to be lifted up into a fuller spiritual life, than this: Let each of us give himself for God to use. God is eager and able to do something for us that we have never yet known. Read Isaiah vi. until all your conscious impotence has been first deepened, but then conquered, by the thought of the Holy God cleansing you with His fire. Oh, prepare yourself to say, “Here am I, here am I.”

3. Then comes a third thought. In the Conference Report it is said: “There can be no forward movement in Missions except as this is attained through a deepening of the spiritual life of the leaders of the Church, and a real spiritual revival among the members. The one real lack to-day is a lack of spiritual life; the one great need the realisation of the constant presence and power of the Holy Spirit.”

It is this we need to pray for, a revival of true spiritual life. Not, in the first place, a revival among the unconverted. God has given that in the past years, but it is as if the Missions have not that access or hold that they had formerly. It is as if God sees that the Church is not living on the high spiritual level that fits her for bearing and rearing strong spiritual Christians. The con verts come too much under the influence of a feeble spiritual life, and too many sink into worldliness and indifference. What we must plead with God for is such a mighty quickening of the power of the eternal life in the hearts of His children, nothing less than the resurrection power of Jesus Christ, as shall give them the intense devotion which marks the true health of the soul. I have spoken of the three circles in every congregation: the larger outer one of the scarcely saved, the smaller inner one of the truly devoted, and then the middle one of those who are ever longing for a better life, and yet are so bound in their impotence that they know nothing of true victory. Let us think specially of these, and plead for them that men may be raised up, full of faith and the Holy Ghost, with the power to lead them to such a vision of Christ as shall make Him become at once to them the object of a glad and complete surrender, and the assurance of an all-sufficient strength for their life in His service. I plead with you to pray for Missions in all their different interests, as never before. Yield yourselves to the Holy Ghost for this work of intercession. And beseech God fervently that He will in your congregation bring His children to such a life in Christ as shall make them a willing people in the day of His power. Set your heart upon this; give God no rest until His Spirit moves among His children in mighty power.

Cherish carefully the thought that you have yielded yourself to God to be set apart as an intercessor, that He will work in you all the grace needed and give you the blessed assurance that you have power with Him. Live in the bold and holy confidence that God is ready through you to bless His Church.

4. As this consciousness becomes stronger you will be able to speak with others and to testify, in the power of the Spirit, of how really God is only waiting for prayer to give the blessing. Try and gather others who are of the same spirit, for conference and prayer. Help each other to realise that you are definitely and persistently expecting God to lift His Church into the abundant life, and cry day and night for it. Help all to feel that this is first of all the object of definite secret prayer. That will be the proof that the life has now been given up to the Holy Spirit, and let united prayer then be a witness to God and your own heart that you are sure that secret prayer will be answered.

If you are a minister, try and find brethren who will give themselves to this great work in the spirit of entire self-sacrifice, of confident faith, of importunate prayer. Help each of them to come to the full sense of his calling, and the confident assurance that God will hear. “If the Conference in Edinburgh should lead some resolutely and irrevocably into the school of prayer, the spiritual power of the Church for the accomplishment of its great task would be immeasurably increased.” Do believe that to take part in such ministry of prayer will be to you the beginning of a new life, of blessing and strength.

Let me beseech all my readers, men and women, children of God, as they lay aside the book, not to refuse the pleading with which it closes, but to say to God whether they do now present themselves as a holy sacrifice to be at His disposal for the work of His Spirit. Let each one say “Here am I,” till his whole being bows before God in the living conviction, “God accepts me, God enables me, God will bless me. What He has never been able to do before through me, He can and will do now. I am His for the great work of helping to lift His Church into the fuller life which cannot but overflow in blessing to a perishing world.”

And let each one of us pray that God may bless every reader who has joined in the surrender with a new discovery of what God will do through him too.

Farewell. Remember, everything depends in the first instance on the individual yielding himself up.