Our Lord’s Surprise Visits
Our Lord’s Surprise Visits
Let your loins be girded about, and your lamps burning; and be ye yourselves like unto men looking for their lord. . . . For in an hour that ye think not the Son of man cometh. Luke 12:35-36, 40 (rv)
The greatest need of the missionary is to be ready to face Jesus Christ at any and every turn, and it is not easy to be ready to do that, whatever our experience of sanctification may be. The great battle all along is not so much against sin, as against being so absorbed in work that we are not ready to face Jesus Christ. The one great need is not to face our beliefs and our creeds, or the question whether we are of any use or not, but to face our Lord. This attitude of being ready to face Him means more and more disentanglement from so-called religious work, and more and more intense spiritual reality in so-called secular work. The whole meaning of the Christian life from Our Lord’s standpoint is to be ready for Him.
The element of surprise is always the note of the life of the Holy Ghost in us. We are born again by the great surprise—“The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the voice thereof, but knowest not whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit” (John 3:8 rv). Men cannot tie up the wind, it blows where it lists; neither can the work of the Holy Spirit be tied up in logical methods. Jesus never comes where we expect Him; if He did, He would not have said “Watch.” “Be ye also ready: for in an hour when ye think not the Son of man cometh”† (rv). Jesus appears in the most illogical connections, where we least expect Him, and the only way a worker can keep true to God amidst the difficulties of work either in this country or in heathen lands is to be ready for His surprise visits. We have not to depend on the prayers of other people, not to look for the sympathy of God’s children, but to be ready for the Lord. It is this intense reality of expecting Him at every turn that gives life the attitude of child wonder that Jesus wants it to have. When we are rightly related to God, life is full of spontaneous joyful uncertainty and expectancy—we do not know what God is going to do next; and He packs our life with surprises all the time.
That is the line on which Our Lord always comes, and the line we are apt not to look for Him. It comes home in ways like this: You have prepared a sermon or an address very carefully and feel that God gave you a good time in the delivery of it, but nothing happens. At another time you talk without much consideration, and suddenly there comes the certainty—“Why, that is the Lord! that was said by Him, not by me.” Beware of the idea that we can tie the Lord Jesus up by spiritual logic: “This is where He will come, and that is where He will not come.” If we are going to be ready for Jesus whenever He comes, we must stop being religious—using religion as a kind of higher culture, and become spiritually real, alert and ready for Him.
Let your loins be girded about.
It is impossible to run in the loose Eastern garments unless they are girt up. The writer to the Hebrews counsels us to “lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth closely cling to us” (rv mg). He is not speaking of inbred sin, but of the circumambient sin, the spirit of the religious age in which we live, which will entangle the feet of the saint and hinder his running the race. Loose, trailing, uninspired thinking about sin will very soon trip us up. Gird up your thinking about sin, about holiness, about the eternal realities and the call of the unseen things. It is amazing to see the unreadiness of even some of the most spiritual people, they are continually clogged and tripped up by the wrong thing. It we are looking to Jesus and avoiding the spirit of the religious age in which we live, and setting our hearts on thinking along Jesus Christ’s lines, we shall be called unpractical and dreamy; but when He appears in the burden and the heat of the day, we alone shall be ready. When you meet a man or woman who puts Jesus Christ first, knit that one to your soul.And your lights burning; and ye yourselves like unto men [looking for their lord, rv].
Am I like a man looking for his Lord where no one sees me but God? In my study, am I a wool-gatherer or like a man looking for his Lord? Am I like a man looking for his Lord in my home, in my contact with other people—is the lamp of conscience trimmed and burning there? Our Lord does not trim the lamp, we have to, and it is not done once for all, but once and for always, i.e. always now. Conscience in a saint will make him look after his scruples according to the light of God. As servants of God in other lands you will have to go among people whose lives are twisted and perverted by unconscious corruption, but if your conscience is as a lamp trimmed and burning, then the Lord can visit others through you at any second.
Is the lamp of your affections burning clear? If not, you will lose out in that way quicker than in any other. Inordinate affection means that you have allowed convictions to go to the winds. Keep the centre of your heart for Jesus Christ and watch inordinate affection as you would the devil. There is more reason to be found there as to why Christians are not ready for Jesus Christ’s surprise visits than anywhere else.
Is the lamp of hope burning bright? “And every man that hath this hope in him purifieth himself.” And what a hope it is! “We shall see Him as He is.” “Blessed are those servants, whom the Lord when He cometh shall find watching.”
Do you imagine that there will be crowds to come up to that standard? Jesus said No, it is one here and one there, always a “little flock.” Our Lord is not talking of salvation, but about being His servants. Whenever Jesus got down to His truth, the crowds left Him (see John 6:66). To-day the craze is for crowds.
The one great need for the missionary is to be ready for Jesus Christ, and we cannot be ready unless we have seen Him. We must trust no one, not the finest saint who ever walked this earth, if once he hinders our sight of Jesus. It is Jesus Christ we have to be ready to meet; Jesus Christ for whom we must work.
Readiness implies a light relationship to God and a knowledge of where we are at present. We are so busy telling God where we should like to go. Most of us are waiting for some great opportunity, something that is sensational, then we cry—“Here am I; send me.” Whenever Jesus is in the ascendant, in revival times, when the exciting moment comes, we are there; but readiness for God and for His work means that we are ready to do the tiniest thing or the great big thing, it makes no difference. We are so built that we must have sympathy or we will never do our best; but this instinct is apt to be prostituted unless we get burned into our hearts an understanding of what Jesus said: “Lo, I am with you all the days” (rv mg). He is the one Who is surrounding us, listening and sympathising and encouraging. Our audience is God, not God’s people, but God Himself. The saint who realises that can never be discouraged, no matter where he goes. The audience of the ready saint is God, He is the arena of all his actions. To know that God is the One Who sympathises and understands and watches us will bring the ready soul into touch and sympathy with God. What we lack to-day is sympathy with God’s point of view. When once we get into sympathy with God, He will bring us into touch with His purposes and with the real needs of men and women.
“Ye shall be My witnesses” (rv). To be a witness of Jesus means that when any duty presents itself we hear His voice just as He heard His Father’s voice, and we are ready for it with all the alertness of our love for Him. The knowledge that Jesus expects to do with us as His Father did with Him becomes the closely imbedded conception of our lives. “I can put you where I like, in pleasant duties or in mean ones; you will know that I know where you are because the union is that of My Father and Myself”—“one as We are.” That is the only simplicity there is, the simplicity of a heart relationship to Jesus. Beware of believing that the human soul is simple, or that human life is simple. Our relationship to God in Christ is the only simple thing there is. If the devil succeeds in making this relationship complicated, then the human soul and human life will appear to be simple; whereas in reality they are far too complex for us to touch. That is why Paul said “I fear, lest . . . your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ Jesus.” We have to keep that pristine simplicity free from anything like tarnish.
Be ready for the sudden surprise visits of Our Lord, and remember there is no such thing as prominent service and obscure service; it is all the same with God, and God knows better than ourselves what we are ready to do. Think of the time we waste trying to get ready when God gives the call! A ready person never needs to get ready. The bush that burned with fire and was not consumed is the symbol for everything that surrounds the ready saint. Anyone can see an ordinary bush, the ready soul sees it ablaze with God.