3. The Detachment for the Master (John 21:18-22)
The Key to Missionary Devotion
3 John 7
We live in a complex world, amid such a mass of sensibilities and impressionabilities that we are apt to imagine that it is the same with God. It is our complicated rationalism that makes the difficulty. We have to beware of every simplicity saving the simplicity that is in Christ.
The key to missionary devotion is put in our hand at the outset, “For His name’s sake they went forth.” The key is amazingly simple, as is everything connected with Our Lord. Our difficulties arise when we lose the key, and we lose the key by not being simple.
1. The Domination of the Master Himself (John 21:15-16)
The Master dominates, not domineers over, His disciples. His is the domination of holy love. If once, for one moment, we see the Lord, we may fall and slip away, but we shall never rest until we find Him again. The destiny of every human being depends on his relationship to Jesus Christ, it is not on his relationship to life, or on his service or his usefulness, but simply and solely on his relationship to Jesus Christ.
(a) Love for Him
Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou Me more than these?
The sovereign preference of the disciple’s person must be for the Person of the Lord Jesus over every other preference. This preference for Him is first and last against all competition. Love is difficult to define, although simple to know; life is difficult to define, although simple to have. What we obtain we can to a certain extent define; but all we have as a personal inheritance is indefinable. Intellect and logic are instruments, they are not life. The tyranny of the intellectual Napoleon is that he makes out that the intellect is life. Intellect is the expression of life. In the same way, theology is said to be religion; theology is the instrument of religion.
Love cannot be defined. Try and define your love for Jesus Christ, and you will find you cannot do it. Love is the sovereign preference of my person for another person, and Jesus Christ demands that that other person be Himself. That does not mean we have no preference for anyone else, but that Jesus Christ has the sovereign preference; within that sovereign preference come all other loving preferences, down to flowers and animals. The Bible makes no distinction between Divine love and human love, it speaks only of love.
When a disciple is dominated by his love to Jesus Christ, he is not always conscious of Him. It is absurd to think that we have to be conscious all the time of the one we love most. The one we are conscious of is the one we do not love most. A child is not conscious all the time of his love for his mother; it is the crisis that produces the consciousness. When we are getting into the throes of love, we are conscious of it because we are not in love yet. We imagine that we have to take God into our consciousness, whereas God takes us into His consciousness; consequently we are rarely conscious of Him.
(b) Love to Him
Simon, Son of Jonas, lovest thou Me? He saith unto Him, Yea, Lord; Thou knowest that I love Thee.
In verse 15 Our Lord had made a comparison—“Lovest thou Me more than these?” Here He makes no comparison—“Lovest thou Me?” To demand a declaration of love beyond comparison is to risk losing all. A missionary must be dominated by this love beyond compare to the Lord Jesus Christ, otherwise he will be simply the servant of a denomination or a cause, or a seeker for relief from a crushing sorrow in work. Many go into Christian work not for the sake of His Name, but in order to find surcease from their own sorrow; because of unrequited love; or because of a bereavement or a disappointment. Such workers are not dominated by the Master, and they are likely to strew the mission field with failure and sighs, and to discourage those who work with them. There is only one thing stronger than any of these things, and that is love.
(c) Love in Him
He saith unto him the third time, Simon son of Jonas, lovest thou Me?
Our Lord’s question elicits the amazed confession of Peter’s deepest heart—“Lord, Thou knowest all things; Thou knowest that I love Thee.” Peter did not say—Look at this, and that, to confirm it. Love never professes; love confesses. “Peter was grieved because He said unto him the third time. . . .” Our Lord’s thrice repeated question revealed to Peter’s own soul that there was no one he loved more than Jesus, and in utter amazement as he looks at himself in his grief, he says, “Thou knowest that I love Thee.” When once the domination of the Master over the heart of a disciple reaches the depth of that expression, then He entrusts His call to that one—“Feed My sheep.”
“Lovest thou Me? . . . Feed My sheep.” Our Lord indicated three times over how love to Himself is to be manifested in the life of the lover, viz., in identification with His interests in others. Our Lord does not ask us to die for Him, but to identify ourselves with His interests in other people—not identify Him with our interests in other people. “Feed My sheep,” see that they get nourished in their knowledge of Me.
Paul in 1 Corinthians 13:4-8 gives the charter of love. “Love suffereth long, and is kind; . . . taketh not account of evil. . . . Love never faileth” (rv). The love of God is wrought in us by the Holy Ghost. He sheds abroad the love of God, the nature of God, in our hearts, and that love works efficaciously through us as we come in contact with others. The test of love for Jesus Christ is the practical one, all the rest is sentimental jargon.
2. The Denomination of the Master’s Name (Matthew 28:18-20)
“Make disciples of all the nations” (rv). That cannot be done unless Jesus Christ is Who He says He is. The apostolic office is not based on faith, but on love. The two working lines for carrying out Jesus Christ’s command are, first, the sovereign preference of our person for the Person of Jesus Christ; and second, the willing and deliberate identification of our interests with Jesus Christ’s interests in other people. Ardour must never be mistaken for love, nor the sense of the heroic for devotion to Jesus, nor self-sacrifice for fulfilling a spiritual destiny. It is much easier to follow in the track of the heroic than to remain true to Jesus in drab, mean streets. Human nature unaided by God can do the heroic business; human pride unaided by God can do the self-sacrificing (cf. 1 Corinthians 13:1-3); but it takes the supernatural power of God to keep us as saints in the drab commonplace days. The need can never be the call for missionary enterprise. The need is the opportunity. The call is the commission of Jesus Christ and relationship to His Person. “All power is given unto Me. . . . Go ye therefore.” Any work for God that has less than a passion for Jesus Christ as its motive will end in crushing heartbreak and discouragement.
(a) Loyalty to His Character
All power is given unto Me.
Loyalty to the Master’s character means that the missionary believes in his Lord’s almightiness on earth as well as in heaven, though every common-sense rational fact should declare loudly that He has no more power than a morning mist. If we are going to be loyal to Jesus Christ’s character as it is portrayed in the New Testament, we have a tremendously big task on hand. Loyalty to Jesus is the thing that is stuck at to-day. Folk will be loyal to work, to ideals, to anything, but they are not willing to acknowledge loyalty to Jesus Christ.
Christian workers frequently become intensely impatient of this idea of loyalty to Jesus. Our Lord is dethroned more emphatically by Christian workers than by the world. Loyalty to Jesus is the outcome of the indwelling of the personal Holy Spirit working in us the supernatural Redemption of Christ, and keeping us true to His Name when every common-sense fact gives the lie to it. In Psalm 73 the Psalmist says that he nearly lost his faith in God because every rational fact seemed to prove that he had trusted a fiction. There is no test to equal the test of remaining loyal to Jesus Christ’s character when the ungodly man is in the ascendant. We are apt to become cynical, and a cynical view is always a distorted view, a view arising out of pique because some personal object is being thwarted.
(b) Loyalty to His Call
Go ye therefore, and make disciples of all the nations. (rv)
Loyalty to the call of Our Lord means not merely that we keep the letter of His command, but that we keep in contact with His nature, i.e., His Name. “Except ye . . . become as little children.”† The meaning of new birth is receiving His nature. The call of the sea, the call of the mountains, the call of the wild—all these calls are perfectly in accord with the nature of the caller, not necessarily in accord with the nature of the one who listens. Everyone does not hear the call of the sea, only the one who has the nature of the sea in him hears it. The call of the mountains does not come to everyone, only to the one who has the nature of the mountains in him. Likewise the call of God does not come to everyone, it comes only to those who have the nature of God in them. The call of Jesus Christ does not come to everyone, only to those who have His nature. Our loyalty is not to stand by the letter of what Jesus says, but to keep our soul continually open to the nature of the Lord Jesus Christ.
(c) Loyalty to His Commission
Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you.
Loyalty to the commission means, first of all, that the missionary sets himself to find out all that his Lord taught. There is not a greater test for loyal concentration than that. Jesus did not say—“Teach salvation,” or, “teach sanctification”; or,” teach Divine healing,” but—“Teach whatsoever I have commanded you.” There is no room for the specialist or the crank or the fanatic in missionary work. A fanatic is one who has forgotten he is a human being. Our Lord never sent out cranks and fanatics, He sent out those who were loyal to His domination. He sent out ordinary men and women, plus dominating devotion to Himself by the indwelling Holy Ghost. A missionary is not sent by Jesus Christ to do medical work, educational work, industrial work; all that is part of the ordinary duty of life, and a missionary ought to be so equipped that he does these things naturally. But Jesus Christ never sends His disciples to do these things; He sends His disciples to teach, to “make disciples of all the nations” (rv).
3. The Detachment for the Master (John 21:18-22)
This detachment to Jesus is rarely referred to, it means personal attachment to no one and to nothing saving Our Lord Himself. Our Lord did not teach detachment from other things: He taught attachment to Himself. Jesus Christ was not a recluse. He did not cut Himself off from society, He was amazingly in and out among the ordinary things of life; but He was disconnected fundamentally from it all. He was not aloof, but He lived in another world. His life was so social that men called Him a glutton and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners.† His detachments were inside towards God. Our external detachments are often an indication of a secret vital attachment to the thing from which we keep away externally. Before we are rightly detached to Jesus Christ, we spend our time keeping ourselves detached from other things, which is a sure sign of a secret affinity with them. When we are really detached to Jesus, He can entrust us with all other things. “Lo, we have left all, and have followed Thee,”†† said Peter, implying—“What shall we get?” Jesus told him that they would get a hundredfold more of all they had given up,†† once the detachment to Himself had been formed.
(a) The Life Sacrificed
Verily, verily, I say unto thee, When thou wast young, thou girdest thyself, and walkedst whither thou wouldest: but when thou shalt be old, thou shalt stretch forth thy hands, and another shall gird thee, and carry thee whither thou wouldest not.
These words are a description of the nature of internal sacrifice and every unspiritual desire will plead against the undesirability of the sacrifice. “God could never expect me to give up my magnificent prospects and devote my life to the missionary cause.” But He happens to have done so. The battle is yours. He says no more, but He waits.
(b) The Life Sacramented
Now this He spake, signifying by what manner of death he should glorify God. And when He had spoken this, He saith unto him, Follow Me. (rv)
Three irrational conclusions—“death,” “glorifying God,” “following Me,” and at His Ascension Jesus disappears. Our Lord never talks on the basis of reason, He talks on the basis of Redemption. What is nonsense rationally is Redemptive Reality. The “Follow Me” spoken three years before had nothing mystical in it, it was an external following; now it is a following in internal martyrdom.
“Sacramented” means that the elements of the natural life are presenced by Divinity as they are broken in God’s service providentially. We have to be entirely adjusted into Jesus before He can make us a sacrament. The missionary must be a sacramental personality, one through whom the presence of God comes to others.
(c) The Life Sacred
Jesus saith unto him, If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee? follow thou Me.
Not only is the life of the missionary sacred to God, but the lives of others are sacred also, and when one tries to pry into another’s concerns, he will receive the rebuke of Our Lord—“What is that to thee? follow thou Me.”