3. Graduating as Obligations Separate (Matthew 11:28-29)
Missionary Munitions
During the Great War the Minister of Munitions of this country said that everything depended on the workshops of Britain. What was true in the enormous world crisis of war is symbolically true in work for God. But what are the workshops that supply the munitions for God’s enterprises? The workshop of missionary munitions is the hidden, personal, worshipping life of the saint.
1. Worshipping as Occasion Serves (John 1:48)
The constant, private habit of the life of the missionary ought to be worshipping as occasion serves, that is the first great essential for fitness. The time will come when no more “fig tree” life is possible; when we are right out in the open and glare of the work, and we shall find ourselves without any value then if we have not been worshipping God as occasion serves. We imagine we should be all right if a big crisis arose; but the crisis only reveals the stuff we are made of, it does not put anything into us. “If God gives the call, of course, I shall rise to the occasion.” You will not, unless you have risen to the occasion in the workshop. If you are not the real article before God there, doing the duty that lies nearest, instead of being revealed as fit for God when the crisis comes, you will be revealed as unfit. Crises always reveal character, and we are all ignorant of our true character until it is revealed to us.
If you do not worship as occasion serves at home, you will be of no use in the foreign field; but if you put the worship of God first, and get the revelation of Who God is, then, when the call comes you will be ready for it, because in the unseen life under the fig tree, the life which no one saw but God, you have been learning and preparing, and now when the strain comes you are perfectly fit to be relied on by God. Worshipping is greater than work in that it absorbs work.
“And He saith unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Ye shall see the heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man” (rv). Our Lord is the One in Whom God and man can meet as one. If that has never been learned in our private worshipping life, it will never be realised in active public work. “There is no need for this private worship of God, I cannot be expected to live the sanctified life in the circumstances I am in; there is no time for praying just now, no time for Bible reading; when I get out into the work and the opportunity comes for all that, of course I shall be all right.” If you have not been worshipping as occasion serves, you will not only be useless when you get out into service but a tremendous hindrance to those who are associated with you. Imagine a general having ammunition made in a workshop at the back of the trenches! His men would be blown up whilst attempting it. Yet that is what we seem to expect to do in work for God.
2. Ministering as Opportunity Surrounds (John 13:14-15)
Ministering as opportunity surrounds does not mean selecting our surroundings, but being very selectly God’s in any haphazard surroundings He may engineer for us. The characteristics we exhibit in our immediate surroundings are an indication of what we shall be like in other circumstances by and by.
“Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into His hands, and that He came forth from God and goeth unto God . . .” (rv)—we might have expected the record to go on: “He was transfigured before them”; but we read that the next thing Our Lord did was of the most menial commonplace order—“He took a towel, and girded Himself. . . . Then He . . . began to wash the disciples’ feet” (rv). Can we use a towel as Our Lord did? Towels and basins and feet and sandals, all the ordinary sordid things of our lives, reveal more quickly than anything what we are made of. It is not the big occasions that reveal us, but the little occasions. It takes God Incarnate to do the most menial commonplace things properly.
“If I then, the Lord and the Master, have washed your feet, ye also ought to wash one another’s feet” (rv). Our Lord did not say: “I have been the means of the salvation of thousands, I have been most successful in My service, now you go and do the same thing”—He said: “I have washed your feet; you go and wash one another’s feet.” We try to get out of it by washing the feet of those who do not belong to our own set—we will wash the heathen’s feet, or feet in the slums, but fancy washing my brother’s feet, my wife’s, my husband’s, the feet of the minister of my church! Our Lord said—“one another’s feet.”
Watch the humour of our Heavenly Father. It is seen in the way He brings across our path the type of person who exhibits to us what we have been like to Him. “Now,” He says, “show that one the same love that I have shown you.” If Jesus Christ has lifted us in love and grace, we must show that love to someone else. It is of no use to say—“Oh, I will do all that when I get out to the field.” The only way to produce the munitions for God’s enterprises is to minister as opportunity surrounds us now, and God will surround us with ample opportunity of doing to others as He has done to us.
The workshop for missionary munitions on which God draws for His work is the private lives of those who are not only saved and sanctified by Him, but who immediately begin to minister where they are. We read of Peter’s wife’s mother that when Jesus touched her, “she arose, and ministered unto Him” (rv); a perfect and complete deliverance, and immediate service; there was no interesting convalescent stage. Some people do not like to get saved all of a sudden, they do not like to have their problems solved in a lightning flash, they prefer to be spiritual sponges—and mop up all the sympathy they can. Peter’s wife’s mother is the type of the life in which God has done His work. In the full and amazing strength of God, she arose and did what lay nearest, and went on as if she had never been ill.
3. Graduating as Obligations Separate (Matthew 11:28-29)
Verse 29—“Take My yoke upon you, and learn of Me,” is the graduating course in the training school of Our Lord. Many of us get as far as verse 28—“Come unto Me,” then come the obligations which separate us from all else, and we have to enter into the discipline of fellowship. We have to take upon us His yoke, and see that we bow our neck to no other yoke; then when the strain comes, we can go through anything.
“Learn of Me; for I am meek and lowly in heart.” We say readily—“Of course Jesus was meek and lowly,” but was He? Read the account of the cleansing of the Temple††; where is the meek and mild and gentle Jesus there? He “made Himself of no reputation,” but when His Father’s honour was touched, all was different. The meekness and lowliness of Our Lord is seen in His relationship to His Father; He never murmured at anything His Father brought, and never gave way to self-pity. That is the meekness and lowliness of heart we need to learn, and we shall never learn it unless the Redemption of Our Lord has been at work in us, completely restoring and emancipating us, and getting us into yoke with Him. If we have taken His yoke upon us, we shall never say when things are difficult—“Why should this happen to me?” We shall be meek toward God’s dispensations for us as Jesus was meek towards His Father.
“And ye shall find rest unto your souls,” you will make the continual discovery of the undisturbedness of heart which is the delight of those who “follow the Lamb whithersoever He goeth.”
The workshop of missionary munitions is the temple of the Holy Ghost, our actual bodily lives. “Know ye not that ye are the temple of God?”†