02.20. God's Instruments
Chapter 20 GOD’S INSTRUMENTS.
It is impossible to study the Kingdom of God in its work and movements on earth without being impressed with the variety and diversity as well as multiplicity of agencies and instrumentalities used by the Lord for the accomplishment of his purpose.
We do not refer now to the differences as seen in hymn, prayer, testimony and sermon, but to the various kinds of people he employs, with the peculiar selfhood, style, manner, temperament, knowledge and gift belonging to each.
We doubt not that if many of us had the calling of the preachers and the stationing of workers in the gospel field, we would make a bad bungle and dreadful failure of the whole matter.
We are sure that the first thing which would impress the observer would be the utter absence of that endless diversity seen in the divine method, while the human arrangement would present a row of gospel laborers most monotonously and drearily alike.
There are churches who would have every minister in the Christian ranks exactly like their own pastor. There are also not a few in the pulpit who would have all laymen, or all preachers, precisely the copy of themselves. They might be ashamed to confess it, but in the hearts of countless thousands there is the conviction that the trouble with the world, and the matter with the church, and the reason there are so few revivals and so little salvation, is that there seems to be nobody else who plans, works, preaches and practices their way. If they could be multiplied all over the land, there would be hope for the world, but as they are but one, and the mould was broken after they were made, alas for the people, the church, the nation and the globe itself. As we listen to their wholesale criticism relative to other workers, and bodies of people, and mark a most notable absence of judgment and censure launched at their own heads, we are compelled to infer that the thought mentioned above is in the heart of many. The adoption of high-sounding, all-embracing Scriptural terms by way of ecclesiastical nomenclature, as well as the irreverent and even profane way of capturing and using the name of God himself, as if he had been monopolized, is one of the symptoms of the spirit of narrowness we are writing about.
Fortunately for the world, the church, the cause of salvation, and the present and everlasting good of men, God’s ways are not our ways. His thoughts are higher and better than our thoughts. His methods of reaching and saving men are wider, broader, profounder and infinitely more effective than our plan and style of accomplishing things.
Some of us would only put scholars and graduates in the field; but God has always had a host of laborers in his vineyard who never had a chance to attend school, never saw a college, and never went through an institution of learning except to go in at the front door and come out at the back. Men in their narrowness would use but one class, but God in his wisdom lays his commissioning hand upon many classes.
Some congregations have a pastor with a funereal manner, sepulchral voice, who dresses like an undertaker and preaches like he was burying the dead. For personal reasons they are devoted to him, and would like all other preachers to pray, read hymns and deliver sermons like their ecclesiastical pet. But while God uses this good man with his little flock, yet he has to consider the endless variety of temperament, taste, education and training in the ranks of hundreds of millions of people outside of the church just named, and therefore send servants, workmen, prophets and priests according to that boundless diversity. So in every age the Lord has used men of sparkling wit, and bubbling humor and vehement spirit and fiery action, all the very opposite of the solemn pastor so well beloved in the church around the corner.
Time would fail to tell how God has employed rough and uncouth men, and profoundly ignorant men, and others with a single gift, or one song, or a shout or a laugh, and through them has moved great audiences, rolling in salvation on the people through them like a flood of glory. Paul, in speaking of this, says: "God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise--and things which are not, to bring to naught things that are."
Repeatedly at meetings, both small and great, we have seen a man unlock a tied up state of affairs, and billows of glory roll down from the skies on the audience, where there was nothing in the appearance of the person to suggest that he was to be the Joshua of the hour, and nothing in what he said to account for the split in the sky and the laughing, weeping, shouting scene in the church or under the tabernacle. But mark the point already made, that there are many styles of people on earth, and there must be numerous ways used to reach them. There are countless thousands of human heart locks, and so the Lord must have many different kinds of keys on his ring. The right key was fitted in on one of those wonderful mornings.
Truly this fact ought not to discourage or unduly humble us. A man must possess all the temperaments and all the gifts and graces and all knowledge and power and be a veritable harp of a thousand strings, if he expects to capture and win everybody. As it is, most of us amount only to a jew’s-harp, or a cornstalk fiddle.
Thank God, however, we can play "Amazing Grace" on them, "How Firm a Foundation," and "There is a Fountain Filled with Blood," and behold a measure of success. But while we cannot draw all and save everybody, others, elsewhere and in different ways from ours, are lifting up Christ, pointing the way to holiness and heaven and getting people saved whom we could not stir or move a single step.
We ought to be glad then over this variety and diversity in the ranks. That, as goldsmiths, silversmiths, tradesmen, lawyers and doctors all united to build the walls of Jerusalem, God has laid his hand upon every gift and power of his people, and engaged them in the work of arousing, convincing, persuading and drawing men to salvation and heaven. So we are thankful for the stormy Elijahs and the weeping Jeremiahs, for the logical Paul and the tender, loving John. For the man who can preach an audience up to the sight of the gates of the Golden City, and for the one who can bring them back and make them willing to bear the cross and go along a lonely, sorrowful, misunderstood way all the days of their lives. For singer, shouter, laugher, weeper, hand-clapper, foot leaper, exhorter, preacher and the whole business--we give thanks for them all, for God uses them all. In full harmony with the thought presented in this chapter, not a preacher who reads these lines but will remember occasions when a strong, convincing argument utterly failed to move the congregation; and then to the speaker’s intense surprise some point or thought little relied upon, some illustration that for a moment he hesitated to use, melted everything and won a complete victory.
Once at a camp meeting, where the preaching had been excellent, of a high order and unctuous as well and yet no particular movement had taken place, the break came one afternoon while a prosy, commonplace old country preacher was talking in a quiet tone and sleepy manner about the glorious triumphs of the Gospel in the days of early Methodism. Right in the midst of the quiet narration there was a sudden falling of the Holy Ghost as instantaneous and startling as if there had been a flash of lightning, a crash of thunder and a heavy downpour of rain. The memory of that afternoon with the misty light under the shadowy rustic tabernacle, the swaying forms, uplifted faces, clapping hands, streaming tears and ringing shouts, will never fade away from our mind. We also recall the figure of the preacher in the pulpit, and do not think that any one in the assembly was more astonished than himself at the marvellous scene before him. All next day he wore a meek, chastened, humble, repressed kind of proud look, as if he carried all the keys of heaven at his girdle, and people would have to call on him to get into the divine storehouse of grace, when really he was just a key himself and only one of the millions which the Lord of Glory carries in his hand. That afternoon our brother happened to fit in the human lock that was before him. On the other hand, at another meeting, a gifted preacher whom we most cordially love and admire, addressing a congregation of laboring, unlettered men and women, began a masterly discourse with the words, "The deductions of ancient philosophy and the trend of modern thought," etc., etc., when there was scarcely a single auditor before him who had much thought of any kind, whether ancient, modern, middle age, or any other age. We question whether any of them knew what he meant by "trend." As for the word "deduction," judging from some of the faces gazing vacantly upward at him, we rather think they supposed he was referring to a farmyard fowl of a new variety. But we heard the same splendid speaker present this noble discourse to an audience of readers and thinkers, and the effect was tremendous. He threw his fishing line in the right pool. His key fitted another kind of lock. The door swung open and how he walked in! It was good to see him with the Gospel in his strong, intellectual, logical grasp knocking the deductions of ancient philosophy and the trend of modern thought head over heels down on the floor and out of the back door, while happy, appreciative souls cried out, "Glory." In one of our summer camps the leaders had preached faithfully, warning especially against backsliding and losing unwittingly the grace of God. But somehow their warnings did not seem to take deep hold. One morning a young preacher, with his mind filled with pictures of the farm and country life where he was raised, stated in his sermon in a simple, natural way that one day, as a lad, he was sent to the field with a bucket of water for his father, who was plowing in the remote distance. He said he was very busy thinking, and hardly realized that his load was getting lighter. But on reaching his father, he gave him the tin can, and behold, there was not a drop of water in it.
He looked back and as far as he could see there was a line or trail of water clear across the field. The bucket had a small hole in the bottom, and it had been leaking from the time he had filled it at the well. So when he reached his father he did not have a drop in the vessel.
There was no need of making an application. Everybody had done that. A kind of foolish looking, troubled, convicted grin was general. They all saw the point and what is more, felt it.
They saw inbred sin as a medium of moral leakage as they had never beheld it before. They understood now how they had lost the grace of God while in the service of God, and had actually run dry while carrying the water of life to others! They had a vision of themselves with nothing in their souls at the end of life’s furrow; and a still more dreadful view of their standing empty in the presence of the Heavenly Father at the Day of Judgment; and we could see that thought and conscience were busy with many that morning on the camp ground.
Meantime we thanked God for the faithful and unique workman he had in the pulpit that day.
Once in the office of a dentist we saw at his right hand a circular revolving table, on which teeth. Just a touch of his finger and the table flew around and his quick eye fell on that which he wanted and in another moment, file, saw or one of the countless drills was in his hand and the work proceeded with the person in the chair. So in the divine work, none of us can be everything. All of us cannot be saws or hammers or files. Some of us may be only a drill, and a great number of us have to give way to a finer drill before the nerve is reached and the work done. We ought to be glad that we are on the circular revolving table and the Lord uses us at all.
Therefore, let us not get up a row with the other instruments. Let us rather be glad that our Lord has such a variety and diversity on his table. The patients are many, the disease is great, the pain tremendous. So we ought to cry to God to use any of us and all of us, and whosoever and whenever and wherever he will, to cure and set at rest forever this poor, miserable, life-burdened, soul-aching, heart-broken old world.
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