^ I remember well how I used to pray for joy. I was told that a Christian must be joyful. I prayed and prayed, and I must say I did not get it. Why not ? Because it does not come by prayer alone. It may come that way, but not alone. I used to think that joy was kept in lumps — packets which were stored up and then doled out — or injected like morphia — and that if I prayed a lump would come. This is a material conception that many hold. They want virtues and graces, and they set-to and pray. They pray for rest, peace, love, joy, and they hope these will drop from heaven and stay with them for ever. But these are Fruits. How can you have Fruits without Branches ? Where are your branches to bear fruit, where is your blossom to precede it ? What's the use of a lump of joy if there are no branches f Now, gentlemen, look up in your Bibles and find out how to get joy; find the cause of joy. Work by the law you know of as "cause and effect." Joy is an effect, find the cause. There is one, just as surely as you have a cause for toothache. Turn to the fifteenth of John, and there you will read the parable of the Vine in the words of Jesus. He tells His disciples about the tree and its branches, and then He tells them the " why " of these things: — "These things have I spoken unto you, that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full." That is the end of the parable — the cause of joy, something of which the effect is joy. Joy comes of a great law. But what is the condition ? Go home and look and see. It is to do good. Abide in Christ and bring forth fruit, then comes the joy, and you can't help yourself. You don't make the joy. It simply follows after a certain cause, and I defy any man in this hall to go off and do something for somebody, comfort them, help them, any one whom you may meet — I say, I defy him to do that and not come back happier and full of joy.^
2. Andrew started at once to spread the good tidings. The day after his conversion was the day in which he became a soul- * Drummond, in Smith's Life of Henry Drummond, 496.
ST. JOHN I. 40-42 107
winner. How instinctive and natural the impulse is, when a man has found Jesus Christ, to tell some one else about Him. Nobody said to Andrew, " Go and look for your brother " ; and yet, as soon as he had fairly realized the fact that this Man standing before him was the Messiah, though the evening seems to have come, he hurried away to find his brother, and share with him the glad conviction. That is always the case. If a man has any real depth of conviction, he cannot rest till he tries to share it with somebody else. Why, even a dog that has had its leg mended will bring other limping dogs to the man who was kind to it. Whoever really believes anything becomes a propagandist. Look round about us to-day ! and hearken to the Babel, the wholesale Babel of noises, where every sort of opinion is trying to make itself heard. It sounds like a country fair where every huckster is shouting his loudest. That shows that the men believe the things they profess. Thank God that there is so much earnestness in the world ! And are Christians to be dumb whilst all this vociferous crowd is calling its wares, and quacks are standing on their platforms shouting out their specifics, which are mostly delusions ? Have we not a medicine that will cure everything, a real heal-all, a veritable pain-killer ? If we believe that we have, certainly we will never rest till we share our boon with our brethren.
^ I am, and have for a long time been, persuaded that if the Christian Church were to claim that fulness of the Holy Spirit which is her birthright, her equipment, the greatest of all her needs, the proportion of what we call evangelists to pastors and teachers would be very much larger than it is at present. Touched with this flame, not only a multitude of ministers, but of the laity, who have hardly tasted the ecstasy of soul-winning, would joyously respond to God's call with a fervent " Here am I, send me ! " Then He could and would send them, and they would come back laden with trophies of victory.^
3. Andrew did not wait until the Master had given him full equipment and training. He started with imperfect knowledge. As yet, and for long after, there was an earthly and mistaken element in Andrew's idea of the Messiah whom he had found. He knew that the Messiah had come, but of the vast consequences
* T. "Waugh, Twenty-three Years a Missioner, 65.
io8 PERSONAL SERVICE
to the world, to the soul, of that coming — consequences extending through the sphere of time into the depths of the eternal future, as we find these things developed in the Epistles of St. Paul — of these at such a time he must have had only an indistinct per- ception. One truth was clearly present to him, whatever else it might involve, and that one truth sufficed to kindle every affection and power of his spirit, to concentrate in its analysis every ray of his understanding, — " We have found the Messiah." He had seen enough of Jesus in those few hours to be awed, attracted, won, — enough to know instinctively that John was right, — enough to know that here was one whom he could perfectly love and trust, — enough to know that the best thing he could possibly do for those nearest and dearest to himself was to tell them of his own experience.