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‘Be patient therefore, brethren, unto the coming of the Lord. Behold, the husbandman waiteth for the precious fruit of the earth, and hath long patience for it, until he receive the early and the latter rain. Be ye also patient.’
Jam_5:7-8
‘Be ye also patient.’
I. How necessary this admonition is in our self-culture.—We are often inclined to lose heart because the work of grace in us proceeds so slowly. We seem to make no progress. Failure follows failure. The old temptations come back to us long after we had thought them put to flight for ever. The old weakness shows itself long after we had fondly fancied it removed. And in a spirit of fretfulness we imagine that all our labour is lost and the harvest-tide of holiness will never come. Has nature no message of comfort for us in such moments of despondency? Do the fruits of the earth ripen instantaneously?
II. No less necessary is this command in our public work for Christ than in our culture of the inner life. A characteristic of our age is its impatient looking for results. It counts heads when the Master only counts hearts. It is feverish in its desire to see something in return for its efforts and expenditure. Christian worker, be on your guard against such a spirit as this. It is the foe to all that is best in religious effort. Results are not ours, but God’s; our part is not to grow weary in well-doing.
III. Yet once more we need to hear this admonition.—In the sorrows of life we are apt to grow fretful and repining, and to forget the glorious ‘afterward’ that is in store for those who are ‘exercised thereby.’ The storms of winter are as necessary to the harvest as the suns of summer. The ice and the snow, the keen edge of the northern blast, the hard rigour of the frost and the heavy torrents of the leaden clouds all come forth from the treasury of God, and have their beneficent purpose in the economy of nature as truly as the ‘golden sunshine’ and the ‘vernal air.’ Nor is it otherwise in the economy of grace.
IV. ‘Be patient, therefore, brethren.’—Early husbandry teaches us this lesson, but how much more impressively is it taught us when we lift our eyes from earth to heaven. ‘My Father is the Husbandman.’ How long He has to wait for the harvest sometimes! Not a single season, not a year, but a score of years must often pass before He reaps from our lives their harvest of holy fruit. Long ago the good seed was dropped into the hearts of some of us by the Spirit of God, but He has not reaped His harvest yet. The weeds seem to grow so fast in us and the seed so slowly. The hair perhaps is beginning to be touched with silver, and yet the lessons of childhood have not borne their fruit. The harvest is so slow in coming! ‘Behold, the Husbandman waiteth for the precious fruit, and hath long patience for it.’ Long patience! Yes, indeed; the patience and long-suffering of our God are marvellous, and some of us have strained them perhaps almost to the breaking-point. Shall we strain them longer yet? Let the infinite, condescending, redeeming love of a patient God begin to find its reward in us to-day. Let the Saviour gather in His sheaves at last. Hold the harvest back from Him no longer, but bid Him come and reap where he has so richly sown.
Rev. G. A. Sowter.
Illustration‘Once when the philosopher of Chelsea was conversing with an English Bishop about the slow advance of Christianity, Carlyle asked with sudden vehemence, “Bishop, have you a creed?” “Assuredly,” was the Bishop’s answer, “I have a creed which is as firm as the very ground beneath my feet.” “Then if you have such a creed,” replied Carlyle, “you can afford to wait.” And so can we.’
ARE MISSIONS A FAILURE?
Now it is a matter of common remark that Christian missions are often looked upon somewhat coldly even by well-disposed people, much more coldly than ought to be possible for Christians with the love of the Lord Jesus Christ in their hearts.
I. The main reason for this coldness is, at least in very many cases, a mistaken estimate of what missions can be reasonably expected to achieve. People point to the large sums of money that are collected annually in this country and elsewhere, to the list of devoted men who give their lives to the missionary cause, to the sanction of Church authority, to the wide popular sympathies that are equally enlisted in the favour of missions, and then they ask: ‘What does all this come to? What is the measure of achieved success? Where are the numerous converts who might be expected to be forthcoming after all this expenditure of varied effort? Is not the disproportion between what is said and done and the actual result so serious as to warrant the disappointment which is thus expressed—a disappointment which is due not merely to a sense of failure, but to an accompanying suspicion of unreality?’ Yet this only is the natural product of one feature of the temper of our day. The human mind is largely influenced by the outward circumstances of the successive forms of civilisation in which it finds itself. We assume that the rate at which we travel and send messages must necessarily have its counterpart in all meritorious forms of human effort.
II. What is this modern way of looking at missions but an endeavour to apply to the kingdom of Divine grace those rules of investment, and return which are very properly kept in view in a house of commerce? Do you not see that this demand leaves God, the Great Missionary of all, out of the calculation? God has His own times for pouring out His Spirit, His own methods of silent preparation, His own measures of speed and of delay, and He does not take missionaries or the promoters of missionary societies into His confidence. He has a larger outlook than they, and more comprehensive plans, and whether He gives or withholds His gifts, of this we may be sure, in view of the truest and broadest interests of His spiritual kingdom: we appeal to His bounty, but we can but do as He bids us, and abide His time. As the eyes of a servant look unto the eyes of the master, and as the eyes of a maiden unto the eyes of her mistress, even so our eyes wait upon the Lord our God, till He have mercy upon us; or, as St. James puts it, like as ‘the husbandman waiteth for the precious fruit of the earth, and hath long patience for it, until he receive the early and latter rain.’
III. Not that this reverent patience in waiting for God’s blessing is any excuse whatever for relaxing the zealous activity with which missionary efforts should be prosecuted by the Church of God. The husbandman does not the less plough the soil or the less sow the seed because he is uncertain whether his labour will be followed by the early and the latter rain. If he does not plough and sow he knows that the rain will be useless at least to him. It is quite possible for a secret indifference to the interests of Christ and His kingdom to veil itself under the garb of reverence, to refuse to help the work of Christian missions because we do not know how far God will promote a particular mission; but that is only one of the many forms of self-deceit which we Christians too often employ in order to evade Christian duties. Duties are for us, the results with God. We have no doubt, if we are Christians, as to what is our duty in this matter. Before us lies the greater part of the human race sitting in darkness and in the shadow of death, with no true knowledge of God, and of the real meaning of life and of that which follows it; and above us there rises the Cross—that Cross to which we are indebted for peace and hope, that Cross on which He hangs Who is the only name given among men whereby men may be saved; and in our ears there sounds the command, uttered eighteen centuries ago, but always binding, always new, ‘Ye shall be witnesses unto Me and unto all the world to preach the gospel to every creature.’ Our part is clear, even though after a century of labour we should have to say with the prophet: ‘I have laboured in vain.’