The moment we offer our allegiance to the Lord, we
immediately expect that He will allow us to stay by Him, to follow Him,
to accompany Him. We expect as the reward and as the response for our
choosing Him, that He will choose us as companions from whom He will not
be parted. Well, we must be prepared for something else, because we do
not join Christ in order to stand about around Him or around His place,
but to serve Him where and in the way in which it is more expedient for
Him and for His purpose.
More than once we can read in the Gospel that someone
healed by Christ, whose life was transformed by his meeting with Him,
wanted to follow Him, to accompany Him, to cling to Him. And Christ said
to him, 'No, go back to your own people. Go away into the world from
which you have come, because it is there that your presence is needed.'
It is enough for us to know God, to know Christ, to know within
ourselves the crushing and transfiguring work of the Holy Spirit. We do
not need more. If we receive more we can be grateful for it and marvel
at the privilege, but our function and our essential privilege is to be
sent by Christ wherever He needs us, into darkness to bring some light,
where there is hatred to bring some love, when there is strife, to bring
some reconciliation, where there is pain, to bring some consolation, and
so forth. Our place is where things are wrong. And we must go there, we
must be there so that there is someone in each situation who will say
'Come, Lord, stand in our midst. Give us Thy peace.'
I want you to give thought to this, because all of us
all the time fall into a natural but ugly temptation to treat God as the
One who gives and who must give. We forget that He is a consuming fire
and we want to sit round a fire and warm our hands. It is not right. If
we have chosen Him, if He has been wonderful, so wonderful as to reveal
himself to us, we can leave it to Him to give us whatever He will
choose, but to live for His sake and for the sake of those for whose
sake He has become man, lived and died. Ask yourself questions about the
way in which you approach Him in prayer. Is it in His Name or in yours?
Is it for His sake, that He may win His victory over you and within you,
or is it that sweetness and peace and joy may come? Ask yourself whether
to be Christ's has anything to do within you, in your life, but in your
deeper self, in turning away from self-centeredness, saying to yourself
whenever thought of self comes, 'Oh, out of my way, because you are in
my way to God and in God's way to me.' Ask yourselves whether you relate
to people in God's Name and in their name or in your own, whether you
can imagine one person in your surroundings about whom you can says
'This person, his existence I contemplate and serve without a thought of
the way in which it may affect me; or whether all the people who are
dear to you, who are your friends, who are your acquaintances, who are
your chance meetings in life, are seen and judged only from your point
of view: 'What shall he do to me? What is this person to me?'
