^ Is it not a great thing to know that God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost cry to us for help from Heaven as they look down upon the masses in London ? " Whom shall We send, and who will go for Us ? " And then the great cry of humanity is : " Whom wilt Thou send, and who will come to us ? " It is an awful thing to think that the Holy Trinity have bound themselves — at any rate, they have planned ; God forbid I should say that God limits Himself to anything — to work through men's ministry and through women's ministry, on other men, women and children — that He uses in other words, human ministry in His work. And therefore to-day, among these thousands of people, if you listen, you hear the great cry come from the heart of the Godhead : " Whom shall We send, and who will go for Us ? " And we are bound, if we believe in it, to answer in our little way • "Here am I; send me." We cannot help it when we believe in it.^
East the forefront of habitations holy
Gleamed to Engedi, shone to Eneglaim: Softly thereout and from thereunder slowly
Wandered the waters, and delayed, and came.
Then the great stream, which having seen he showeth,
Hid from the wise but manifest to him, Flowed and arose, as when Euphrates floweth,
Bose from the ankles till a man might swim.
Even with so soft a surge and an increasing. Drunk of the sand and thwarted of the clod,
Stilled and astir and checked and never-ceasing Spreadeth the great wave of the grace of God;
Bears to the marishes and bitter places
Healing for hurt and for their poisons balm,
Isle after isle in infinite embraces
Floods and enfolds and fringes with the palm.*
> A. F. W. Ingram, The Love of the Trinity, 54. * F. W. H. Myers, Saint Paul.
326 THE APOSTOLIC BENEDICTION
*[} I often think I see as it were, the Lord, sitting up in Heaven, looking on our sanctuaries with their mock performances and sham religion, saying, " Where are the tithes ? " The people pray, in some sort of way I suppose, for God to pour out His Spirit and save men ; and yet I think I can see the Lord Jesus almost weep- ing over them, and in an agony saying, " Why do you cry to Me to do what you ought to be doing yourself ? Why don't you arise and do as I have told you ? Why don't you send the gospel to every creature ? " What the Lord wants is that you shall go about the business to which He sets you, not asking for an easy post, nor grumbhng at a hard one. Not saying, " Lord, I never engaged to do this." Like the servant we sometimes get into our houses, all goes smoothly till the child gets the whooping-cough or the measles, then she comes to you and says, " I didn't bargain for this." She is not a servant for sickness. She is only a servant for fine weather. Are there not multitudes who act just the same towards the Lord Jesus ? All goes smoothly till persecu- tion arises, then they say, " Lord, this is too much." j They say, " good-bye," or, if they don't say good-bye, they pocket their profession, and betray Him in their hearts. The Lord is tired of this mockery, this farce, and He says, " I will provoke you to jealousy by a people who are not a people, and will anger you with a foolish nation, seeing that you will not be My servants in truth, and that the great mass of you will not follow Me in holiness; I will raise up a people from the gutters and slums, gin-palaces and public-houses. I will make a people for Myself, who will follow Me all lengths." I want you to determine to be such a servant as this.^
IV.
Be With You All.
1. In what sense and to what end may the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy iJhost be said to be with us ? It cannot mean less than a conscious personal Presence. The invocation cannot seek grace, love, and communion as gifts apart from the Persons, in whom alone they are to be found. Neither grace, love, nor communion can have any reality apart from personality. We cannot give love and withhold ourselves ; there cannot be communion without mutual
' The Life «f Catherine Booth, ii. 417.
1 COR. xin. 14 327
exchange. The prayer cannot be for anything less than for the conscious presence of God in the soul. Jesus teaches that the Father, Son, and Spirit are all equally present in the soul of the believer. Speaking of the Spirit He says, " He abideth with you, and shall be in you " ; of Himself and the Father He saith, " If a man love me, he will keep my word : and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him." The Personality is neither lost nor confused. They come distinctly as Father, Son, and Spirit, but One Lord. Jesus dwells in man the source of all grace, God abides in him the spring and perfec- tion of all love, and the Holy Spirit communes with him and energizes for all the will of God. Man is indwelt of the Triune God and dwells in Him. So, when we speak of the grace being with any, in the sense of the text, we mean that they are so the objects of it that it is continually working its effects in their person and history, and that the sense and assurance of it abides in their hearts.