4. The Master Touch in Speech—The Master Speaker
The Missionary’s Master
To have a master and to be mastered are not the same thing, but diametrically opposed. If I have the idea that I am being mastered, it is a sure proof that I have no master. If I feel I am in subjection to someone, then I may be sure that that someone is not the one I love. To have a master means to have one who is closer than a friend, one whom I know knows me better than I know myself, one who has fathomed the remotest abyss of my heart and satisfied it, one who brings me the secure sense that he has met and solved every perplexity of my mind—that, and nothing less, is to have a master. Jesus Christ is the Master of the missionary. The conception of mastership that we get from human life is totally different from the mastership of Jesus. If I have the idea that I am being mastered by Jesus, then I am far from being in the relationship to Himself He wants me to be in, a relationship where He is easily Master without my conscious knowledge of it, all I am aware of is that I am His to obey.
Our Lord never takes measures to make us obey Him. Our obedience is the outcome of a oneness of spirit with Him through His Redemption. That is why, whenever Our Lord talked about discipleship, He prefaced it with an “IF”—“you do not need to unless you like”; but—“If any man will be My disciple, let him deny himself,”†† i.e., “deny his independence, give up his right to himself to Me.” Our Lord is not talking about a man’s position hereafter, but about being of value to Him in this order of things. Human authority always insists on obedience; Our Lord never does. He makes His standard very clear, and if the relation of the spirit within me is that of love to Him, then I do all He says without any hesitation. If I begin to hesitate and to debate, it is because I love someone else in competition with Him, viz., myself. The only word by which to describe mastership in experience is love—“If ye love Me, ye will keep My commandments” (rv).
Obedience to Jesus Christ is essential, but not compulsory; He never insists on being Master. We feel that if only He would insist, we should obey Him. But Our Lord never enforces His “thou shalt’s” and “thou shalt not’s”; He never takes means to force us to do what He says; He never coerces. In certain moods we wish He would make us do the thing, but He will not; and in other moods we wish He would leave us alone altogether, but He will not. If we do not keep His commandments, He does not come and tell us we are wrong, we know it, we cannot get away from it. There is no ambiguity in our mind as to whether what He says is right. Our Lord never says “you must,” but if we are to be His disciples we know we must. Christianity is not a “sanctified” anything; it is the life of Jesus manifested in our mortal flesh by the miracle of His Redemption, and that will mean that whenever a crisis comes, Jesus is instantly seen to be Master without a moment’s hesitation; there is no debate.
“Ye call Me Master and Lord: and ye say well; for so I am”—But is He? The great consciousness in the mind of Our Lord is that He is our Master, and we, too, have to come into this consciousness. “Master” and “Lord” have very little place in our spiritual vocabulary; we prefer the words “Saviour” and “Sanctifier” and “Healer.” In other words, we know very little about love as Jesus revealed it. It is seen in the way we use the word “obey.” Our use of the word implies the submission of an inferior to a superior; obedience in Our Lord’s use of the word is the relationship of equals, a son and father. “ . . . though He were a Son, yet learned He obedience by the things which He suffered.” Our Lord was not a servant of God, He was His Son. The Son’s obedience as Redeemer was because He was Son, not in order to be Son.
1. The Master Touch in Sickness—The Master Physician
And He touched her hand, and the fever left her; and she arose, and ministered unto Him. (Matthew 8:15 rv)
These words crystallise for us the revelation of Our Lord as the Master Physician. When He touches, there is no convalescence. Unless the missionary is one who has been touched by the Master Physician, his touch may be one of skill but not of supreme healing. When Our Lord is the Master of a disciple, He conveys His effectual touch through him to others.
Touch has more power than even speech to convey the personality. If some people touch us, we feel the worse for it for days; if others touch us, we live a transfigured life for days. That is an experience recognisable by us all, but we may not have realised that it is because the touch conveys the dominating personality behind. A caress from a bad personality is incarnated hypocrisy. It is at grave peril to our own souls that we ignore these subtle indications of warning. When once the barriers that God creates around His children are broken down and His warnings ignored, we shall find that the enemy will break through at the places we have broken down. If we keep in touch with the Master, He will keep us out of touch with badness.
The Master touch of Our Lord breaks the fever of self, and life is profoundly altered. When Our Lord is the Master of a disciple, no matter where he goes, His touch comes through him all the time. She only “touched the hem of His garment.” The missionary is, as it were, the hem of His garment, and virtue goes out through the garment’s hem to the needy one who touched.
2. The Master Touch in Sightlessness—The Master Artist
Then touched He their eyes, saying, According to your faith be it done unto you. (Matthew 9:29 rv)
The Master Touch produces sight.
In human sight the thing we soon lose is what Ruskin called “the innocence of the eye.” An artist records exactly from this “innocence” of sight, he does not bring in his logical faculties and interfere with what he sees by telling himself what he ought to see. Most of us know what we are looking at, and instead of trusting the “innocence” of sight, we confuse it by trying to tell ourselves what we see. If ever you have been taught by anyone to see, you will know what this means. Drummond says that Ruskin taught him to see. An artist does not tell us what he sees, he enables us to see; he communicates the unutterable identity of what he sees. It is a great thing to see with anyone. Jesus never tells us what to see, but when His touch is upon our eyes, we know that we see what He is seeing, He restores this pristine innocence of sight. “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”
An artist conveys his personality by means of his medium and creates wonderful things, and if the Master touch has given the missionary his sight, God can do wonderful things through him. Paul was sent by God to “open [men’s] eyes, and to turn them from darkness to light.”
A skilled artist does not need to use more than two or three colours; an amateur requires all the tubes in his box squirted out like a condensed rainbow. The Master Artist used strange things to open blind eyes, e.g., spittle, clay, and water from a pool—but remember He used them, and He produced the miracle of sight. The missionary may easily be looked on as one of the despised things, but if Jesus uses him, he will produce sight in men.
3. The Master Touch in Hearing—The Master Musician
And He touched his ear, and healed him. (Luke 22:51)
When the Master touch comes on the sick or the sightless or the deaf, the miracle of the personality is conveyed at once. Touch conveys the personality to the flesh and to the sight, and sound conveys the personality to the hearing. It is personality that gives to sound, which is un-moral, its moral or immoral character. There is some music, for instance, that you listen to at the peril of your soul because of the personality behind it. Better by far be unmusical than listen to it. The one who is healed by the Master Musician has the personality of God conveyed to him. When we have been ravished with the wonder of the Master Musician’s music, He gives us a badly tuned instrument to put into repair for Him.
4. The Master Touch in Speech—The Master Speaker
And He took him aside from the multitude . . . and touched his tongue. (Mark 7:33)
This incident is one of many that reveal the unique use of speech by Our Lord. “And looking up to heaven, He sighed, and saith unto him, Ephphatha, that is, Be opened.” The tongue was in its right place in Our Lord, He only used it to speak the words of God, He never spoke from His right to Himself. “The words that I say unto you I speak not from Myself: but the Father abiding in Me, doeth His works” (rv). The words Jesus spoke were the exact expression of the thought of God. “And the Word was God.”
The Master Speaker, after conveying His life to us by means of His words, turns us loose into a tower of Babel and tells us to speak His messages there. The missionary is one whom Jesus Christ has taken aside from the multitude, and, having put His fingers into his ears and touched his tongue, has sent him straight forth from hearing his Master, with his own tongue loosened and his speech plain, to speak “all the words of this life.”