Disciples and Apostles

“And when it was day he called unto him his disciples, and of them he chose twelve, whom also he named Apostles.” — LUKE vi. 13.

I WANT to speak to you to-day of Foreign Missions. I hope and I believe that it is not an unwelcome subject. It would be very melancholy, I think, if after all these years in which we have pondered and studied together the Gospel of our Sa viour, and learnt in all the changing experiences of life something of its precious value, we should still find our hearts grudging the single Sunday of the year which is given to the special consideration of our duty to make the whole world sharer in that Gospel which we claim to love. Rather this Sunday ought to seem the flowering Sunday of the year. To-day we ought to seem to come into the very heart of the Gospel. The other Sundays may well seem beside it to have been lingering upon the borders of our faith. To-day we come directly to its centre, and, with true confidence in both, claim our Saviour for the world and claim the world for our Saviour. May such a mind and spirit be in us to-day.

I have turned for a text to one of the critical times in the life of Jesus. It was not a time which made much noise. The act which Jesus did was very quiet. It did not come with observation. Only after wards, as time went on, did it appear how important the event really was. But when we look at it to-day we can see that it marked the advance of the whole work of Jesus, from its first into its second stage; from the condition of a local school, into the ambition of a world-wide religion. It is all told in a few words. Jesus “went out into a mountain to pray, and continued all night in prayer to God. And when it was day he called unto him his disciples, and of them he chose twelve, whom also he named apostles.” It was the time when out of the heart of the discipleship came the apostleship. And what do these words mean? Disciple, of course, means learner. The idea rests entirely between two persons, the teacher and the scholar. It involves nothing but the receiving of knowledge by some one docile mind. But Apostle means missionary. Its idea is utterance, or sending forth. It sees and feels the great wide world. It looks out to the very horizon of humanity. It takes truth not as a lesson, but as a message. What the disciple has drunk into his own satisfied soul, the apostle is to carry abroad, wherever there are men to hear it.

When then Jesus turned his disciples into apostles, you see what an event it was. It was really the flowering of that Gospel which he had been pouring into them through all their discipleship. The plant fills itself with the richness of the earth. No noise is made. The whole transaction lies between the plant and the rich earth that feeds it through its open roots. All is silent, private, restricted. But some day the world looks, and lo! the process has burst open. Upon the long-fed plant is burning a gorgeous flower for the world to see. The long supply of nourishment has opened into a great display of glory. The earth has sent its richness through the plant to enlighten and to bless the world. The disciple has turned to an apostle.

Notice, when Jesus took this great step forward, he did not leave behind his old life with his disciples. He chose out of the number of his disciples twelve, whom also he named apostles. They were to be disciples still. They did not cease to be learners when he made them missionaries. The plant does not cease to feed itself out of the ground when it opens its glorious flowers for the world to see. All the more it needs supply, now that it has fulfilled its life. And so this great epoch in the Christian Church was an addition, not a substitution. John, James, and Peter, were all the more devout disciples of the Master, filled themselves all the more eagerly with his truth and spirit, after they had become his apostles and were telling his truth to other men.

And notice yet another thing. It is out of the very heart of the discipleship that the apostleship proceeds. It is the very best, tin- rliuirest, ;is wu say, of the disciples, that are chosen to be apostles. This is apparent to any one who reads the story. Jesus calJs all his disciples together, and out of them he chooses twelve. It is no inattentive idlers hanging on the outskirts of the group who listen to him, that he thinks good enough to go and carry his message. It is they who have listened to him longest, and most intelligently, arid most lovingly. It is Simon and Andrew his brother, James and John, Philip and Bartholomew, Matthew and Thomas; it is men like these, the very heart and soul of the discipleship whom he selects and calls apostles. And so it always is. Always it is the best of the inward life of anything, that which lies the closest to its heart and is the fullest of its spirit, which flowers in to the outward impulse which comes to complete its life. It is the most truly thorough learning which by-and-by begins to be dissatisfied with its own learned luxury, and to desire that all men should have the chance of knowledge. It is the most true refinement that believes in the possible refinement even of the coarsest man. It is most intelligent appreciation of the blessings of free government which looks beyond the narrow walls of national pride and desires freedom and good government for all the world. I hold it to be one of the most beautiful and re-assuring facts in all the world that the purer and finer any good attainment grows, the more it comes into the necessity of expansiveness. It is the crude and half formed phases of any good growth which are selfish and exclusive. It is the half cultivated people who guard their feeble culture by arbitrary lines of separation. The heart of any good thing is catholic and expansive. It claims for itself the world. It longs to give itself away, and believes in the capacity of all men to receive it. This noble and true and beautiful truth, whose illustrations are everywhere, was it not declared by Jesus, when out of the choicest heart of the group of his disciples, he selected his apostles?

Most deeply is this truth illustrated in the history of man’s idea of God. It is the purest and loftiest and divinest thought of God that is most generous and world-embracing. Men dream of gods that are scarcely higher or better than themselves; gods stained with passion and with selfishness, and those gods do not care for men. The Lotos-eater pictures his gods like himself. He sees them in their selfish repose.

“On the hills together, careless of mankind.

For they lie beside their nectar, and the bolts are hurled

Far below them in the valleys, and the clouds are lightly curled

K’. .11 nd their golden houses, girdled with the gleamy world;

Where they smile in secret, looking over wasted lands,

Blight and famine, plague and earthquake, roaring deeps and

fiery sands,

Clanging fights and flaming towns, and sinking ships and praying hands.

But they smile, they find a music centred in a doleful song Steaming up, a lamentation and an ancient tale of wrong, Like a tale of little meaning, though the words are strong/

So sing the Lotos-eaters; then listen to Isaiah’s song about his God: “He saw that there was no man, and wondered that there was no Intercessor; therefore His own arm brought salvation.” By as much more as He is purer and holier, by just so much more is He larger, less able to rest in His own satisfaction, more compelled to go and help the poor sons of men; and so it is out of the heart of the holiest conception of deity that the Incarnation comes.

Shall we not then set down as absolutely fundamental in our study of the Christian Church, this relationship between the disciple life and the apostle life, that is, between the inward and the outward impulse? In the life of every parish this relationship ought to be recognized. The failure to recognize it is what makes so many of our parishes very far from what they ought to be, keeps them uneasy with a constant doubt of themselves, and a continual sense that they are suspected by the world outside. What is a church or parish for? What is the meaning of this little company gathered out of a great community, which meets in this building, for instance, statedly, Sunday after Sunday, year after year? No doubt they are, in the first place, learners, disciples, students together of the truth of God, listeners at the lips of the Master for his revelations. But unless there is continually issuing from the heart of their discipleship a true apostleship, unless the best souls among them keep fresh and live the outward impulse, the consciousness that their church and they exist not for themselves alone but for the world, how their church life grows dead.

Those of you who have loved the church longest and most dearly, will bear me witness that there is always an inward, self-enclofling tendency to be resisted, l.y every congregation. Very often 1 1nmore the congregation wakes up to earnest life, this inward tendency asserts its strength. Given its full sweep, it would make the congregation a club, existing for high ends indeed, but existing for its own benefit alone. It would make the pew as exclusive and private a piece of property as the parlor. It would judge the way in which its work was being done by the way in which those few selected people were becoming wiser and better men and women. If it admitted outsiders at all, they would come in simply as spectators of that process of culture which was going on. It would be a church of disciples. It is a constant effort, I say, requiring continual watchfulness both in minister and people, to see that an earnest church does not come to this, to see that it is kept apostolic;, with the outward consciousness always alive, knowing that it exists not for its pewholders, but for the community; for just as many of the human race as it possibly can reach; knowing that its pewholdera will get the best good out of it the more completely they can feel, the more manifestly they can show, that they feel that it is in no real sense their church. It is first God’s church, and then the church of all or any of God’s children. I cannot help saying how truly I believe that this apostolic consciousness is present in this congregation. God grant it may increase and deepen till our church shall never cease to feel, through all the satisfaction of its own life, the life of every j»« pr godless creature on the rich streets or the wretched streets of Boston, as a mother never loses the feeling of her reprobate son, half round the world, though for the moment she can do nothing for him.

But if we look not at a congregation, but at the best and most growing human lives, I think that this relationship between their outward and their inward tendency falls into a certain sort of system, which is continually repeated. It is a sort of pulse, which we can feel beating as we stand with our finger on the heart. Every life which comes to its best begins with a sort of loose expansiveness; it is drawn in ward till it reaches an almost selfish concentration; then it opens with a larger and finer movement to embrace mankind. This, it seems to me, is the normal and healthy course of any character. There is an illustration in the history of these twelve men who were with Jesus. Think what they must have been before they knew their Master. The open life of free and thoughtless young men, they must have lived, easily making friends, easily entering into everybody’s superficial interests because they had only superficial feelings of their own, liking to be liked, and full of ready sympathies. Then they met Jesus. They were drawn away to him. By him they were drawn in upon themselves. To know him, and to know their own deeper lives in him, became their longing. They must have been missed from their old haunts in Capernaum. They must have passed their old companions almost like strangers on the street. Their lives were folded in upon themselves, and upon him who was at the centre <>t each. But by-;ui<l-lpy a new power lu-^an to work at the enfolded heart. He who hud drawn them in upon himself, began to send them abroad. Another kind of love for their old friends, and all the world whom those friends represented, came to them. They began to be seen again upon the streets. They began to find out once more their old companions. Only now they are preaching. Now they are telling every one of the new life. Now the power of expansiveness is not their own careless good fellowship; it is the eager soul-craving grace of Jesus Christ. They have been drawn in from the world upon him, that he might send them out, full of himself, into the world.

That is a picture of every Christian life which works itself oui? to its completeness. There is the first easy instinctive human brotherhood; there is the drawing in and retirement of the nature on itself, with any strong experience, most of all with the strongest of all experiences, the occupation of the soul by Christ; then there is the large expansion of the strengthened soul, as it longs for the complete society, the brotherhood with man in God. It is the beating of the great spiritual pulse. It is the systole and diastole of the heart of a whole man’s history. It is the succession of man’s fellowship with man, man’s discipleship to Christ, man’s apostleship to men for Christ, succeeding one another.

Here is a man in our company who to-day, with light-hearted, careless indifference, is the easy friend of everybody whom he meets. He welcomes all who give themselves to him; he gives himself to anybody; because to give and take is such a shallow thing that it makes no impression. His intercourses are of that surface sort which do not get down to where men are really different from one another, and so he easily consorts with whomsoever he may meet. He feels no deep needs in himself, and so anybody satisfies him. And now to that man comes some revelation. Perhaps he enters the deep water of some great sor row or some overwhelming joy. Perhaps he is swept into the irresistible current of some absorbing study. Perhaps, greatest of all, that in which all the others find their only worthy completion, he is drawn into the bosom of the realized love of God by the strong arm of Christ his Saviour. What is, what must be the first sign of that great thing which has come to pass? A silence falling on the noisy communicativeness, a turning inward that they may watch the won drous work within the soul of those eyes which have been wholly busy in seeing the quick kaleidoscopic changes of the things outside, a loosening of every other grasp, that the hold on the new friend may be complete. Men will stand round and lament almost as if they mourned for the dead. “How he has gone from us! How his life, which used to lie all plain and open, is hidden. And where? We cannot tell! He says, With Christ in God. We do not know. But evidently he is gone from us.” So they stand round him and lament. But by-and-by, strangely but certainly, they become aware that he is coming back to

/Disciples and A post Itin-in; and comim;- far Mmn- richly, with far more

dose and generous and lender giving of himself to

them, than in those ol<l and careless days. I’ehold now ;dl that he has is theirs. He loves them with

a new love. He honors them with a new honor. He

looks into their faces as if he saw behind each of them another lace, which shone through theirs and uave to their nordidness its dignity and value. Vhere lie used to open his arms to them. now he opens his heart. When- he once gave them his counsel, or hi;; purse, now he gives them himself. Out of the retirement has come a new companionship. The pulse of the life has once more beat ontwaid, and to the contraction this new expansion has succeeded.

It may be that this pulsation ill go on and repeat itself again and again. It may be that some new revelation of truth will draw the poul om more in upon itself, but the glory of the true Christian life will be that it always reacts more vigorously out ward for every new self-feeding upon Christ. This is its legitimate and healthy movement. I>iscipl«- ship and apostleship are the pulsations of the ( ‘hristian heart. Th — y feed each other. Kay, why may

not look higher still and when in the j,, rions vision, which yet lor all its myst< ry is true, we see Jesus standing forth full of the holiness of eternity, and saying, k< !.<». I come,” in answer to a needy world’s cry lor help, why should we nut recognize that for tin- divine as well as f< r the human, for (Judas well as man. there is a necessity that the inward completeness should niter itself in ontuard communication; that the best which the soul is in itself, should be turned towards and poured upon whatever other soul may need it anywhere?

And now we have only to pass up from the individual to the race, and see how the same law which we have been tracing applies there too. There too we have these same three stages in the intercourse of man with man, and in their succession lies the history of the Christian Church, which can never be, ought never to be, considered as something apart from the history of humanity at large, but simply as the heart of human history, its centre, its ideal, working out in type or pattern what must ultimately be the destiny of all. What are the stages? First there is the natural aggregation and companionship of man, the instinct for society, that which makes tribes and states and families, that which inspires the self-sacrificing fellowship of which savage history gives us some glimpses, and of which poets love to sing, glorifying far off barbarian islands as if the romance and the heroism of friendship belonged to them, and almost necessarily died out as soon as their barbarian simplicity was invaded by civilization. X<> doubt this is not wholly poetry. No doubt there is a certain spontaneousness of human inter course which belongs most naturally to the rudest and simplest conditions of life. With culture comes reserve. With the teaching of spiritual religion comes the emphasis of the single life and the clear demarkation of that group among mankind which is called the Church. The world lingers long in this

164 J)iscip/cs and Apostles.

itage, The Church accepts exclusr nl limitation as her law and principle of life. But uraduallv, as she fills out her life more ami more, she becomes aware of a new impulse. She Kevins to press on her own borders. She begins to see in the distance a new fellowship of man, a great deal clearer becac UK at deal deeper and more reasonable than the <>ld. The easy brotherhood of eavage life shows hut poorly beside the great fellowship in Christ which is to fill the New Jerusalem. To the bringing about of that fellowship the Church by-and-by conserratt-s itself, accepting the missionary impulse as the only complete fulfilment of its life.

I am sure, my dear friends, that this is the only true conception of the relationship between the notion of culture and the notion of missions in the Christian Church. The notion of culture IK preparatory to the notion of missions. The men and women in a Christian land, in a Christian congregation, who are consciously growing wiser, braver, purer, stronger by their share in the worship of a Christian Church, are on the way to a great unselfish concept ion of life, in which the bravery, comfort, purity and strength of their brethren anywhere in the world, shall lie dear to them by the same motive of lov.- t.» Christ and desire for the progress of his kin-d< in, which makes their own soul-lit’” dear. Unless their

spiritual culture finds its culmination in that craving for the spread of truth and the saving of men’s soul, it is a thoroughly nnsatisfactory thing. And yet,

what do we see? .Merely to look at it on the smallest scale, I have seen people standing outside of this congregation of ours, restrained from full entrance into the circle of its life by the natural, the inevitable necessities which limit the range of any one congregation, complaining of the exclusion, unreasonably finding fault with the exclusiveness of those who were its members. By-and-by, in time, the way is opened for them to become part of our body, to have their regular place among us, and all the incidental privileges of our organization. And more than once I have seen those very persons become the most exclusive, the least willing to welcome some new comer to the fellowship into which they them selves have found their way. It is the everlastingly recurring tendency to rest in the stage of discipleship and to refuse to cross the line into a/postleship. There could be no better description than that of the indisposition of the faithful, constant, devout and thoughtful worshipper to believe in, to give his heart and his money to foreign missions. Discipleship, but not apostleship for him! And yet the one is wofully incomplete without the other. The one trying to live without the other, shows an inherent lack in the fundamental qualities of faith in God and faith in man, which are what the Christian religion really means. This is the real sadness of the position which one often hears taken by the earnest, devout and conscientious members of the Church at home. They say that they do not believe in foreign missions. The sadness is not simply that in Africa or China darkness is to be left in some little region where they might send light. It is that they declare tin- imperfeetness of their own i’aith; that they frankly say that either they <lo not believe that <iod can do tor other men what he is d< y «l;,y tor

tin-in, or else tiicy do not believe thi »ther

men are capable of receiving from <iod those i

ingS of the higher life, which they arc taking from him constantly — the lack of faith in God or the lack of faith in man. And yet to have those tw. faiths, and to grow richer in them constantly, is wnat it means to be a Christian. It is not the desire t«» enforce the argument of a Foreign Missionary sermon, it is the sincere and deep conviction of my soul, when I declare that if the Christian faith does not culminate and complete itself in the effort to make Christ known to all the world, that faith appears to me to be a thoroughly unreal and insignificant thing, destitute of power for the single life, and incapable of being convincingly proved to be true.

But I have dwelt long enough, perhaps too long, upon this general plea for the essential apostleship of Christianity. I want to address myself, in the few moments which I may yet occupy, to the peculiar aspect which the mission of our religion to the world presents in these especial modern times in which we live. A great deal of what is said concerning For-Missions always seems to me to take for granted a state of things which has long passed away, and More the condition into which the world and Christian thought have passed to-day, and into which lh<- ‘are more and more fully entering. Men who arc earnestly, almost blatantly, progressive in other things, are centuries behind the times in this. For the world has changed. With its new rapidity of communication, with the intermingling of its races, with the careful study of one part by another part, with the disposition of the weaker races to seek relations of protection and dependence with the stronger, it is simply impossible that every nation, every race should keep its own religion uninvaded, uninfluenced by any other. The practical issue of all the present tendency of human life must be that the best thought of the world will overcome the worse thought. There must come a natural selection of religions, a survival of the fittest among faiths. No longer can a range of mountains restrain two ideas of God away from any contact or comparison with one another. No longer can an ocean shut a barbarous superstition out of all knowledge of a bright, pure, enlightened belief, that blesses men upon the other side. The winds that pulsate with all other messages, will not be silent concerning the good news which all hearts need. The waters that are no long er walls but bridges, will be trodden by the invisible feet of Faith. To dream to-day of that which old Rome dreamed, when, looking over her vast domain, she saw each subject race keeping its own faith, provided only that all the gods and oracles would teach unquestioning loyalty to Ca3sar; to think that it is possible that all the nations of the earth should live under their separate religions, provided only that each religion should uphold tho modern ldng-idc:is of personal rights. of upen trade and of internal i«»nal obligations, that is tin- most hopeless backwardion that lin-’Ts behind tin- closed eyelids ol’ any blind conx rvati-m. The early Christians set out iroin ‘a-san a and walked with simple, trustful right through that vain dream of old Uoine. The modern Christian is found halting and helpless before the far more empty vision that haunts our haltawakened Christianity.

And if the world has changed, so too lias Christianity itself undergone changes which ought, to any man that understands them, to illuminate the bility of the conversion of the world to Christ. What are they? Compare the religion in which you were brought up, O my religious friend of forty years, and tell me! There surely is a difference. You will not talk to your children wholly as your parents talked to you. The notion of conversion is a more intelligible thing. The tests of the new life are more distinctly those which may be known and read of all men. The conception of personality in religion, of the necessary difference of every man’s religious Hie from every other’s, has won an almost exaggerated prominence. And in the stress of criticism and of unlx’lief, the Christian faith has been compelled to realise herself, to know what truly is a part of her and what is accidental. She is like a ship at sea, in hard and furious weather, which has taken in every thing that is ornamental, which she carried easily and almost thought she could not sail without when kies were lair, and is sailing now through the tempest with all herself, but nothing but herself; strong in her restored simplicity to go through storm and hurricane. This is what the Christian faith is to-day, and is more and more becoming, the simple loyalty to Jesus Christ, the cordial wish to see every man’s and every race’s faith develope into its own type of life, the knowledge that each man’s new life is his old life, his ideal life; that every man’s conversion is but the re-entrance into the first plan of God, for which he was made. My friends, there never has been a religion so made for all the world as that. Our own dear faith has never, since she stood tiptoe with St. Paul upon the shore of Troas, ready to cross over into Europe, has never since then stood so ready for her work, “with loins girt up to run around the earth.” It is the meeting of these two conditions of our century that makes the friend of missions hope. The opening world, the simplifying faith! Stanley penetrates to the centre of the dark continent, and when he comes out he has left there, in the hands of King Mtesa, the despotic ruler over two million people, as a kind of epitomized Bible, a board on which the fascinated, half-converted savage has had written in Arabic, that he may daily read them, the Ten Commandments of Moses, the Lord’s Prayer, and the command of Jesus, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” The opened world — the simplified faith! Surely this of all times is not the time to disbelieve in Foreign Missions; surely he who despairs of the power of the Gospel to convert the world

170 Disciples and A post.’

1;)-day. despairs of the noontide juat when the sunrise is breaking out of twilight on tin; earth.

1 think auani that it is wonderful how many:

llio understand perfectly what tin- Co.-p. 1 is, in tin- work that it docs for them, arc all wron — in their conception «>f what the (Jospel has to do lor the world, and so have false’ conceptions about the lhole possibility of missions. They talk as it what t! ligion of Jesus had to do, was to go a perfect stranger into a dark land, with whose people it had 1 had no concern, to cast out everything that they had ever believed, to falsify all their hopes, to begin their life all over. Perhaps they thought the same tiling once about themselves. Perhaps they stood for years untouched by Christianity, because Christianity seemed to them to be the utter destruction of all that they had ever been, or thought, or hoped. They could not understand it. It was all strange and foreign to them. But by-and-by Christ really came, and lo, he was the iwealer of that old life. He purified that old self; but it was it still, purified and saved, that he set up to be the burden of their thanksgiving. The old hopes were enlightened; the old ignorant prayers were fulfilled. It was as v. hen the Apostles went out and cried up and down Jud< -a, “The Messiah has come,** and Judea understood it self. It was as when Paul stood on Mars Hill, and cried. “Whom you ignorant ly worship. Him declare I unto you;” and the altar to the unknown ( Jod l

for the first time into the bright Ua/.e of ail intelli sacriiice. And that is what the Christian fulfilling its missionary duty, has to do for all the world. It is the great interpreter of the religious heart of man. Its manifested God speaks, and the divine voices throughout all the world become intelligible. Its message is declared, and countless oracles that were all blind, win a clear meaning. Its sacrifice is held up, and the heathen altar drops its veil of superstition, and discerns its own long lost intention. Its Son of Man goes with his gracious footsteps through the hosts of heathen barbarians, and their sonship to God leaps into consciousness and life. Not as the rival, but as the mother of them all, eo does she stand, harmonizing them with her presence and drawing all that is good and true of them into herself.

If that be her function and her right, then it is no unreasonable and bootless task. It is what Jesus did for Judaism. It is what Peter did for Cornelius. It is what some faith must some day do for all the partial and corrupt and rival faiths of men. I could not believe in my own dear faith, the sweet, pure, strong faith of Christ, if I did not believe that to her and to no other belonged that glorious privilege.

All, my dear friends, my people, there is the final truth about it, from which we cannot get away. We cannot believe in our Christ for ourselves, unless we believe in him for all the world. The more deeply we believe in him for ourselves, the more certain we shall be that he is the Saviour of the world. A deeper personal faith, a more complete discipleship, that is what you want. Have that, and the apostleship must conic. It’ tln-iv is any part of your life not wholly consecrated to him. if 1:. of his love

Which you liavc not appropriated) if then- is any undone duty, which, as you do it, will open for new door into his heart, if there is any word, by speaking which you can commit yourself more utterly to him; just as surely as in any of these ways you deepen your own spiritual life and make Jesus more your Saviour, just so” surely you will believe in Foreign Missions, and long to tell all men th ;t h is their Saviour too.