Preparation for Service.
BY REV. J. HUDSON TAYLOR. FROM AN ADDRESS DELIVERED IN CHINA. HE Lord Jesus Christ is not only our Saviour, but our
Pattern in service. "As the Father sent Me, so send I you." Now if we look back
to those by whom God spoke
to the fathers in olden time, we find they were always
sufficiently equipped for ser- vice. You will find no record
of God using one unequipped man. Sometimes we see a man, like Moses, called in- deed to a particular work, pushing himself into it before he had received his equip- ment, and then there is failure. The disciples to whom the great work of evangelising
the world was given, were charged : —" Tarry ye in the city of Jerusalem until ye be endued with power." But for our service
full equipment is already provided ; and God is willing to give us all we need, as we need it. He does not equip for life service
all at once. He does not expect us to toil along, burdened with
next year's provisions on our back. There are fresh supplies on
the way, fresh light, fresh power, fresh revelations, as circumstances require.
I. EMPTYING. When the Lord Jesus was to be brought into the world, what was the great thing He needed ? The first thing was not a
filling but^n emptying. In order to deal with empty creatures
like we are, what a laying aside, what a leaving behind He had ! And what He gave up was all good. So for our work it is not
sufficient that we are prepared to put away that which is evil, things which no Christian can hold to. We have to learn that the very first step in fitting us for our work is emptying. The
Holy Spirit has given us some glimpses of the glory of those
things that God has prepared for all those that love Him ; but
of all these glories, and of more, the Lord Jesus stripped Himself. He, the Lord of Angels, became lower than the angels ; and He who was eternal, and necessarily deathless, took on Him
a mortal frame in order to die. Yet we are told of Him that He
who was made a little lower than the angels has been
" crowned." This crowning was peculiar—it was that of tasting death for every man ; it was the glory and honour of suffering, of conquering him who had the power of death by becoming
subject to him. He conquered the devil by submission, not by
resistance. There is something parallel to this in the life of Paul. Paul was in bonds in Rome, and we might have imagined that his
: February, 1897.
position was one that would have deterred the brethren. Butwhat does he tell us ? That they waxed confident through his bonds. So far from his sufferings taking courage out of thebelievers, when they found what a little thing a chain was to anApostle, they felt—" We can preach with good courage—whatis it, after all, if Christ is only in us ? " Christ living, Christreigning, made the Apostle so superior to all these things, that
it encouraged others to go forward, though at the risk of thesame trials that the Apostle endured. TRIUMPH BY MEANS OF REVERSES. Must it not have been the same thing in the jail at Philippi
when Paul and Silas thrust into the inner prison, their backsraw from the cruel scourging they had suffered, were singingpraises to God ? The very prisoners must have felt how impossible it is to punish such men as these ! Their persecutors couldonly fill them fuller and fuller with joy, till they overflowed moreand more. They kept the prisoners awake, I have no doubt,with their abounding joy. There is no better way of proving to the world that the devil's power is not so very great, than byletting him have his fling, and showing in the midst of it what a triumph over him the believer has in Christ. Just as Christ, bydying, conquered him who had the power of death, so frail, feeble martyrs, many of them tender women, in the time of Romanpersecutions, were able to show that all the power of paganismcould do nothing against those who were filled with Christ. Hence there were many conversions in the very arena in whichthe martyrs were suffering, and the blood of the martyrs proveditself to be indeed the seed of the Church. So it is now. It is not in holding and claiming our rights that we do the most service for the Lord. Is it not rather in letting them go, and thus showing that these things are nothingto us ? If we are so filled with the Spirit that we can count it all joy when we fall into divers temptations, depend upon it weare giving the devil back the hardest blow we can give. Onlylet wicked men see that we are frightened, and shrink out of the way of loss and cross, and they have their triumph. Let them,on the contrary, see that we are rejoicing in Christ in the midstof these things, and we shall be truly followers of the LordJesus, of the Apostle Paul, and of the martyrs who through Godsubdued kingdoms, and overturned religions, and brought abouta thorough revolution, just when it seemed impossible to with- stand the combined attempts of Jew and pagan. Their foes thought they had succeeded; they even announced in their edicts that Christianity was defunct ; but it was paganism that tottered. We need not be afraid of persecution. It is coming—it is sure to come. Only let us have such success as to make the people fear the abolition of their customs, and we shall see severe persecution. But are we to fear lest the Gospel should