Plaque in the chapel of Ridley Hall.Chapter x, continued.
This leads me to say a little, in closing, of the all-importance to the servant of Jesus Christ of the maintenance of his own personal joy and glory in his Master. The sad secret of the spirit I have just sought to deprecate lies in the subtle substitution, somewhere and somehow, of self for Jesus Christ. It is calling the work “mine” instead of “His.” It is working for my credit rather than for His glory. It is attracting, or trying to attract, to me, not altogether to Him. And where shall we go for the remedy? It must be to Him. It must be found in the renewal of our sight of Him, without one cloud between, even the cloud of our own restless activities. We must get a new view of “the fair beauty of the Lord,” and of the blessedness and pleasantness of our lot and part in Him.
“From the loss of our glory in Thee, preserve and keep us, gracious Lord and God.” Such is one response in a solemn Litany of that venerable
I have read of a servant of Christ in the past, a man singularly rich in the gift of spiritual influence over individuals. He was asked to disclose something of his secret. His reply, in essence, was that it lay, as far as he knew, in the sense of profound contentment with his blessed Master in which his soul was kept through grace. Jesus Christ irradiated him within and for himself. He was, at the very centre of his soul’s consciousness, deeply happy to belong to “his King who had saved him,” and to be used by that great and holy Possessor as should seem best to Him. And this took friction and anxiety out of his life in a very wonderful way, while it kept that life, so to speak, always directed, peacefully and unwearily, towards the thought of service, towards the idea, and the expectation, of being used. And the service was all the happier, because it was not the source of the man’s happiness. The source and secret was Jesus Christ; and that secret acted equally whether marked success attended action and speech, or apparently no success at all; whether the servant was put by the Master into the front rank of active reapers in the harvest field, or told to “sit down in a corner and sharpen the sickles of others”; whether he was called to speak in spiritual power to a multitude, or to lie still on a sick bed. That heaven-given spirit, in a blessed paradox, was for him the source of at once workfulness and of repose. And in a very marked degree it preserved the worker from the infection of the sin of envy, of jealousy, of selfishness. Ah! in the air of a life so hid with Christ in God, do we not feel instinctively that such sin could not breathe? “The fruit of righteousness is sown in peace”; in the peace of God. It is one of the deepest and most sacred laws of the life of the children of God that their activity has its root in passivity; their strength has profoundly much to do with weakness; their rising up and going on with giving way and sinking down; with that opposite of positive effort which is yet so fruitful of work – “Yield youselves unto God.”
“From the loss of our glory in Thee, preserve and keep us – us who humbly ask to serve Thee for ever – gracious Lord and God.”
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