The day after Andrew's conversion was the day on which he became a soul-winner. The new-found life in Christ always longs to impart itself. The wonderful things which Christ whispers to a man in secret burn within him until he can tell them to other ears. When the pilgrim in Bunyan's story had been relieved of his burden, as he knelt before the Cross, his joy was so great that he wanted to tell it to the trees and stars and water-brooks and birds; to breathe it out to everything and every one.
“Let the redeemed of the Lord say so,” sings one Psalmist; and the redeemed, I will add, simply cannot help saying so. “I have not hid thy righteousness within my heart, I have declared thy righteousness and thy salvation,” sings another Psalmist. Yes, when a man has experienced the salvation of God the word is like a fire in his bones, and he must declare it.3 [Note: J. D. Jones, The Glorious Company of the Apostles, 99.]
I received a letter from a very sagacious Scotch friend (belonging, as I suppose most Scotch people do, to the class of persons who call themselves “religious”), containing this marvellous enunciation of moral principle, to be acted upon in difficult circumstances, “Mind your own business.” It is a serviceable principle enough for men of the world, but a surprising one in the mouth of a person who professes to be a Bible obeyer. For, as far as I remember the tone of that obsolete book, “our own” is precisely the last business which it ever tells us to mind. It tells us often to mind God's business, often to mind other people's business; our own, in any eager or earnest way, not at all. “What thy hand findeth to do.” Yes; but in God's fields, not ours. One can imagine the wiser fishermen of the Galilean lake objecting to Peter and Andrew that they were not minding their business.1 [Note: Ruskin, Letters on Public Affairs (Works, xviii. 540).]
1. What was the power that made Andrew a missionary? It was the intensity of spirit that Christ stirred in His followers. He had the prophet's power of kindling passion, of awaking youth in those who loved Him. When He spoke, men rose from the dead! And of course they did great things. All their powers put forth leaves and blossoms and flowers. These who saw and heard men who had come under the influence of Christ wondered, as one who has seen a wood in winter wonders when he sees the same wood in spring. They took notice of them, it is said, that they had been with Jesus. The mocking crowd thought it was new wine, but it was the new wine of a new life. It made men a new creation in Christ Jesus.
And that is our work. Are we doing it with all our heart? Is it our first thought? Does it possess our soul with passion? Is it our greatest and divinest joy to save and rescue men for God to a life of love, purity, sacrifice, progress, and immortality? My work! I say. How can that be? I am not an apostle, not a preacher, not authorized; and I have my own work in the world to do. Not a preacher? If we know God and love Him, how can we help telling men about Him; how can we help saving men whom we see lost, suffering, and sinful? Not authorized? The Apostles were not set apart as a special class, nor do their so-called descendants form one. Ministers are set apart, not to be a class, but as representatives of that which all men should be. They are specially called to be fishers of men in order that they may teach all who hear them to be fishers of men. We know that is true when we think about it, when we begin to care for doing the thing itself. The moment a man asks himself what he can do in this way, he finds the work ready to his hand, close beside him. The moment we have the heart to do it, do we mean to say that we can help doing it? Not save, help, console, uplift, teach the sinful, the weak, the pained, the broken-hearted, the ignorant; not rush into this work with joy? We cannot help being fishers of men, and we ask no authority for that Divine toil. It is human work, and it makes us men to do it. It is Divine work, and it makes us one with God to do it.
“Oh, for a church of Andrews!” I do not know that many ministers would want a church of Peters; it would be too quarrelsome. I am quite willing for Thomas to go to the City Temple and Simon Zelotes to Whitefield's. Let me have a church of Andrews-of simple, loving men, content to bring people to Jesus. Men like Andrew are so valuable because everybody can be a man like Andrew. Not a greatly gifted man, but a greatly faithful man; not a man who would dispute with Peter as to who should be primate, or with John and James as to who shall sit on the left hand of Christ and who on the right, but a man who simply and humbly and lovingly does the work that lies nearest to him. He surely is of those last in the world's estimate who are first in the Kingdom of God.1 [Note: J. E. Rattenbury, The Twelve, 95.]
2. Andrew began his missionary activity in his own home. This is what the Gospel says: “He findeth first his own brother Simon, and saith unto him, We have found the Messiah. He brought him unto Jesus.” Young men and young women are ambitious to engage in missionary work or to enter the ministry. They are all on fire with the romance of missions; they want to go to those vast mysterious regions where multitudes sit in darkness, or to prove their preaching gifts before great audiences at home; and, meanwhile, they almost despise the humbler evangelical work which is waiting at their own doors. But the first proof that they are fit for the larger call is found in their willingness to answer the smaller and immediate call.
Every zealous Christian should begin at home. He wants to make his light shine as a witness there among his own kinsfolk. For these are, and must be, more to us than others-children, brethren, parents, husband, and wife. No one, whether young or old, can rejoice in the light and love of God without anxiety and intense desire to make every member of the home circle partner with him in these things. It is always painful to think that they are separated from us by a barrier of unbelief; that they who have so many dear things in common with us have no communion with us in the best and dearest thing of all. And every Christian who thinks seriously of this finds it such a trouble to him that he cannot help bearing some sort of witness for Christ in the home. Never does he kneel in prayer without supplicating for the near and dear ones. He longs to have them persuaded. Oh yes, and he will endeavour, God helping him, to make his whole life in the home a speaking witness for Christ-a gospel that utters itself either in words or without words, a gospel that shows itself in sympathy, forbearance, kindly actions, gentleness, cheerfulness, unselfishness. You remember what Jesus said to the man out of whom He had cast a legion of devils, and who, in his gratitude, wished to remain at Jesus' side: “Go home,” said Jesus, “go home to thy friends, and tell them how great things the Lord hath done for thee.” He was to become a missionary, and his first sphere of service was to be his own home. That is exactly what Andrew did without being ordered-he became a missionary to his own home.
The first member of a family who is brave enough to show his religion where all around in the household is indifference and worldliness; the first little boy in the school dormitory who-like Arthur in the story of Tom Brown's Schooldays-dares to kneel down and say his prayers by his bedside, as he had knelt in his nursery at home; the first soldier in the barracks who has the courage to rebuke the profanity and impurity which prevail around him; the first pitman who raises his voice against the gambling and the intemperance of his companions-these, and such as these, are the true heroes of God, of whom Andrew was the forerunner.
The Rev. J. W. Dickson, of St. Helens, who was one of Dr. Paton's students at Nottingham Institute, in his notes of the Principal's obiter dicta, quotes him as saying: “There is no place so difficult to begin work for Jesus as the home. Said a servantgirl of her master, a Wesleyan minister: ‘Many conversions at chapel, but never a word for poor Polly; I do wish I could find Jesus.' We [ministers] think of congregations, of young men, of the outsider; but we need to think of home and of ourselves,”1 [Note: J. Lewis Paton, John Brown Paton, 359.]
3. But Andrew's labours were not confined to his own home. We read in the Gospels that he was the means of introducing to Jesus those Greeks who were so anxious to see Him. Nothing stirred our Lord's soul as did the coming of those Greeks. They were the first-fruits of the Gentiles, and in vision Christ saw the Kingdom stretching from shore to shore and from the river unto the ends of the earth. And it was Andrew who brought them.
We find in this incident a repetition of the characteristic which Andrew had showed at the first. He is the man who quietly and by personal efforts brings men to Jesus. Some of the disciples would have hesitated to introduce foreigners to Christ. They would, perhaps, have rejected the notion that the Messiah was sent to the Gentiles, or at least would have feared the possible effect on the populace of throwing Christ into association with outsiders. Philip was undecided what to do till he had consulted Andrew. But the latter seems to have better understood his Master. He felt that Jesus would be glad to help and save any; and it was just in the line of his habits to be thus the medium of leading inquiring minds to the Saviour of them all.
St. Andrew is styled by the Greeks Protoclet, or first-called: and by the Venerable Bede, Introductor to Christ, a name aptly assigned to that large-hearted Saint who at the outset of his ministry brought St. Peter to the Messiah, and at subsequent periods introduced to his Lord's notice not only certain Greek suppliants, but even a lad who had five loaves and two small fishes. After the apostolic dispersion from Jerusalem, St. Andrew, preaching the Crucified from place to place, travelled, according to tradition, into Russia, and as far as the frontiers of Poland. At Patrae in Achaia, having kept the faith and exasperated the Proconsul by a harvest of souls, he finished his course. On an Xshaped cross, constructed as is alleged of olive-wood, and to him the pledge of assured peace; to his yearning soul less the olivetwig of the pilgrim dove than the very ark of rest; on such a cross after ignominious scourging he made his last bed, and from such a bed he awoke to that rest which remaineth to the people of God. The outburst of his joy on beholding his cross has been handed down to us: “Hail, precious cross, consecrated by my Lord's Body, jewelled by His Limbs. I come to thee exultant, embrace thou me with welcome. O good cross, beautified by my Lord's beauty, I have ardently loved thee, long have I panted seeking thee. Now found, now made ready to my yearnings, embrace thou me, separate me from mankind, uplift me to my Muster, that He who redeemed me on thee may receive me by thee.”1 [Note: Christina G. Rossetti, Called to be Saints, 3.]
