(4) But when Andrew spoke thus, he knew little of the real Christ. During the next three years he was to be continually finding Christ. He found Him anew in the Sermon on the Mount. He grew larger to his thought as he saw Him heal the sick, teach the inquiring, forgive the sinning. He grew still mightier as he watched Him feed the thousands, still the storm, and raise the dead. And the Christ in the upper room, in Gethsemane, and on Calvary, towered still higher above the Christ to whom he introduced his brother, and was in turn surpassed by the Christ of the Eesurrection morning and the Ascension Mount. It is a red-letter day in any man's life when he finds Christ, but that is only the beginning of his religious life. From that point we " follow on to know the Lord."
2. To-day our Lord is living and working among us, revealing His glory and manifesting His power, to a far greater degree fchan when He trod the plains of Galilee, or taught in the Temple courts. But of this the majority of men are little conscious. The need of our times is for men and women who can say with
102 PERSONAL SERVICE
the conviction of Andrew, " We have found the Christ." Amidst the perplexities of our modern life, there is a cry for those who can speak with certainty of Divine things. It was the peerless personality of the Son of God that first attracted Andrew, and made him declare to Peter the discovery he had made. And the same attraction is operating to-day. Men are not won by beliefs about Christ, but by Christ Himself.
(1) If we would find Christ, we must be looking for Him, and preparing for Him. God taught His own chosen people for whole generations. He taught them about the Messiah, who He would be, what He would do, preparing by His messengers the way before Him; and the consequence of all that steady, systematic teaching was that, when the fulness of the time was come, and one brother said to another, " We have found him, of whom Moses in the law, and the prophets, did write," they had not to ask who was meant ; they took all their old religious knowledge
id religious teaching in their hand and went to Jesus, and md Him to be all that they had learnt He would be. And so with our teaching of religious truth ; we teach the history of Christ, and His sermons and His parables and His miracles; and we teach, laboriously perhaps, and in the sweat of our brow, the meaning of His Word and of His Sacraments. It is not labour lost. When the fire from heaven descends upon the sacrifice to consume it, it does so all the more readily because the prophet had previously prepared the altar, and set the wood in order, and laid the sacrifice on the wood.
(2) But we must not be content to know about Christ. We ..'must come into personal contact with Him. We must be in
the house with Him, we must learn to know Him as the Son of God and the Lamb of God — as that One who came from His Father to be our Brother, to share our nature and to bear our sins and to take us back to God as His Father and our Father, His God and our God — a Friend in sickness and sorrow and death, who points us through death to life eternal. This is the one great discovery, compared with which all other inventions are shortlived opiates of an hour — a little ease on the road to death.
(3) Having recognized the Master when we are brought face to face with Him, we must trust Him as Andrew did. Possibly these early disciples may have thought that, having " found
ST. JOHN I. 40-42 103
Christ," the rest was easy and secure ; that the new Kingdom of great David's greater Son would present no difficulties, either to flesh and blood or to mind or spirit ; that, having found and recognized and honoured the King, there was nothing to follow but position and privilege, and glory such as the Kingdom could and would liberally supply. If this was their thought, they were quickly to be undeceived. The King, though personally dearer to them every day, seemed every day to become more mysterious and unintelligible, and His Kingdom more dis- appointing and more remote. If He began to tell them about His coming Kingdom, He spoke in parables which they could not understand. If He showed evidence of His superhuman power, it seemed to be His policy to restrain the publication of those miraculous proofs as much as possible. When they suggested that an exhibition of His wrath in the way of punish- ment might be a warning to His opponents, He rebuked their ignorance of the very spirit of His Kingdom. When they expected Him to be telling them of coming triumph, He could speak only of persecution and suffering and death, until fee uncontrollable " Be it far from thee " broke from the lips of their scandalized spokesman. What, then, was the charm, what was the bond, which held the Master and followers together? We answer without hesitation, it was their personal love of the Christ whom they had found. This was what made all disappoint- ment at His want of success and all perplexity as to His doctrine equally unable to break up their little society. They did not pretend to understand His methods or His objects, but when He laid before them one of the hardest and most difficult of His doctrines, that which caused many of His disciples to go back, and walk no more with Him, Peter, answering for the Apostles, could neither turn back nor yet pretend to say that he under- stood the difficult matter in question ; but in all the helplessness of a constraining love, with all the confidence of such a plenary devotion as has no other choice and wishes for no other, he put the seal on his former declaration, " We have left all, and followed thee," by adding to it, " Lord, to whom shall we go ? thou hast the words of eternal life. And we believe and are sure that thou art that Christ, the Son of the living God."