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TOPIC: Gordon, Samuel Dickey - Quiet Talks About Our Lord's Return (Other Topics in this Collection)
SUBJECT: 64. New Messenger
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New Messenger
"Love never faileth." Men may fail; means may fail; love, never. Patience is love at its best. Difficulties that conquer all other foes are conquered by patience. It waits its opportunity, it bides its time; it uses whatever is at hand to be used, but never force, save love's sweet coercion. It never loses sight of its object, and is never swerved by so much as a half hair-breadth from its object. It never fails to get what it is after. Patience is love at its best in the midst of difficulties. "Love never faileth."
God is love. He never fails, and His purposes never fail. Through the tangled network of proud, stubborn human wills, He patiently works and waits, waits and works, and never fails to accomplish the object, and to bring untold blessing to the owners of the human wills through which He has been working.
The Hebrew nation failed in its greatest crisis and opportunity. The King, walking in the guise of human garb, saw clearly ahead the coming rejection. He would not openly anticipate it. They would have the fullest opportunity up to the last half-moment. But He begins to prepare for their successor. The world would not be left without a Light-holder. So the disciples were chosen, and trained. And so the human corner-stone of the Church was being prepared, before the Jewish structure had quite toppled off its base.
The Church was to be the successor to the mission of the Hebrew nation. It was to be a messenger-body to all the race. Its bond of union was the Lord Jesus Christ Himself. It was a body of men redeemed by Him, owing life itself to Him. Love for Him, loyalty to Him,—this personal bond to Himself was its bond of union. Its principle of organization was the presence of the Holy Spirit. He in each was the uniting of all together. His presence made the organization. There were outer forms of organization, leaders, agreements, customs, and so on. These were needful, but incidental. He within was the vital principle of organization, holding all together, and relating each part to each other, and to the whole.
Its composition was peculiar. There was no racial, nor national, nor any other such line drawn. They were a body of people taken out from all nations. Hebrew and Gentile, who had before hated each other bitterly, were drawn together on one footing, by the person of the Lord Jesus, and by the indwelling Holy Spirit. Its mission was identical with that of the Hebrew nation. It was to be the witness of God to all the world. It was the light-holder in the gathering gloom. The fingers of the first holder of the torch had paralyzed through stubborn sinful rejection of the light. The torch fell from their grasp. It was picked up, ere it fell, by the new light-holder.