UNITY IN DIVERSITY

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Oct 29, 1902

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 28, No. 44.

UNITY IN DIVERSITY.

God is one, His life is one, but the manifestations of that life are many. Galaxies of suns shine and roll in the azure vault of heaven by the power of the same life that causes the little violets and forget-me-nots to bloom and exhale their perfume on the ambient air.

This is a characteristic of the work of God in His church, and with and through His church for others. While all believe the same Word, hope in the same Gospel, are baptized into the same Spirit; while “all speak the same thing” and “are perfected together in the same mind and in the same judgment,” as regards God’s blessed truth, and the one purpose of His work, yet is there difference in their work. All have not the same model for the manifestation of the life in them. There are reasons for this: (1) Character is not formed by mechanically following some particular pattern of lines and rules, of angles and curves, of squares and circles; (2) The work of God would be hampered, crippled, narrowed, by all following the same model. Let us study these thoughts further:—

1. Character is not formed by practising formal rules. A cold, dead building may be laid out in that way. But from the day it is completed it begins to deteriorate. It has no life within itself. It may be grand, beautiful, useful; but it would be an unnatural parent who prefers the building to an undeveloped child, coarse, awkward, homely tho the child is. The building is all there is. Change and fluctuation may effect its market price, but it grows not in actual value. But the child is a bundle of undeveloped possibilities which if rightly directed may be of infinite worth. The child eats material food, and grows. The mind feeds upon intellectual food, is placed on constant strain to grasp the manifestations of life and action, and the mind expands and grows. The heart, the soul, feeds on the things of God, and grows and bears fruit to God’s glory.

The important thing for the individual soul is to leave dead forms and to seek God’s life, to receive God’s life. But are we to ignore God’s law, to ignore Christ’s example?—not at all. Submission to God’s law as it is in Christ Jesus places us in the normal current of God’s life. When Jesus said to the young man, “If thou wouldst enter into life keep the commandments,” He did not mean that life might be earned by a mere legal conformity to law. He did mean that when the soul yielded to do, not only what a world-blinded mind might now see in the law, but what it would continually see, it thereby yielded itself to life’s control, and placed itself in that relation to God where His life could flow in and cause the soul to grow and develop.

No man can attain Christ’s character or his conception of Christ’s character, by following any set of rules, however high morality they may express. At the most he can but build a dead form which will immediately begin to deteriorate. But if he receive the life of Christ, if he feed upon the Word of God, that life, that Word, will develop within him a warm, living, responsive character, according to the Master’s desire. The seeds of the violet will always produce violets. The seeds of the maize will always produce maize. So the incorruptible seed of the Word of God will, if received and given free course, always produce Christ-like characters, pleasing to God. This seed will not grow something else. It will not develop an anarchist, who will seek to destroy God’s government. It will not develop a traitor who seeks to undermine God’s law by substituting human expedients for its holy precepts. It will not develop abnormalities. If the true life is within, if there is a good spiritual appetite to feed upon the Word, a character will be grown against which God’s law will bring no condemnation. Rather, the law will witness to its righteousness. Rom. 3: 21, 22.

At best we see so little of Christ Jesus by anything we may read. We must know His life and His power, as developed in His people, as yielded to us. We must experience His creative power in transmuting our own lives into new forms hitherto undreamed of, leading us into paths never known before. In all this His life controls, not ours. We can make but cold, hard, dead forms; He makes living temples, living stones, living trees, which never cease to grow and bear fruit.

2. The work of God is ever hampered and crippled by following the same model. And yet this process has been most frequently followed by those who profess the name of the living Christ. Missionary A, a man of indefatigable zeal, indomitable perseverance, and unfaltering love for souls, enters a field and achieves success. His methods may not be invariably correct. There may be branches which should be lopped off, greater nourishment should be given to some roots, but nevertheless, he has been pre-eminently successful in winning souls. God has blessed him, not because of any model, but because the man was yielded to God and God used him.

Missionaries B and C and D, whose work is merely nominal, hear of A’s success, and determine to visit his field. They see what before they had heard. They note the smoothness of the working of the machinery of this field, and the large results obtained with little expenditure of means and time. They study methods and plans, and fail to see the larger life and power back of them all—the great bulkhead of living waters which turn the wheels and supply not only the energy, but the oil. They see the methods, the plans, adapted to the fields and the men, outgrowths of the work, manifestations of its life, and not steel barriers to hold or control or limit it; and they conclude about as follows: Now if we could adopt his methods, his plans, we, too, would have success. And so the naked forms, the rules, the plan of the organization of his work are adopted in an entirely different field, by different men among different peoples, and great success is hoped for. Our evangelists will run in shoes made upon his last, and surely they will have success!

But what is the result?—In this one respect it is better perhaps, it breaks some of the ice-bound fetters of old, but the general result is the same. The form is there, but not the power, the life, and the work drags on as before, until some other missionary’s example is followed with the same result. O, the sadness of it all! It is not God’s way of doing. He works from life, and the life is essential and primary. The forms are secondary, and may be left to the divinely directed, creative life. That life may develop a new form, new plans, new methods, far better adapted to the particular field in which the worker is placed.

Sometimes one worker falls into a similar error. He holds a series of meetings. Feeling his own nothingness he earnestly seeks God, places himself where God can use him, and his work is attended with glorious success. He goes to another field. He longs for success there. He looks back to his former success, thinks it all over, and concludes that if he only follow the same order, plan, method, his work will be a success in his new field also. He goes to work, and his work is a comparative failure. He used the dead form instead of letting the Master of Life use him. The Master might have developed the same form, the same plans, and the same methods; but the development should have been left to the Great Director and not confined to His finite servant.

And is not this the teaching of the Word? Take the following for instance: “Now concerning spiritual gifts, brethren,” writes an apostle, “I would not have you ignorant. . . . Now there are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit [which furnishes the life]. And there are diversities of ministrations, and the same Lord [who directs]. And there are diversities of workings, but the same God, who worketh all things in all.” 1 Cor. 12: 1-6.

These are suggestive thoughts for this time. May God’s abundant life be received by His people of whatsoever name, because they are submitted to the law of His life; and may He develop in them the greatest aptitude to learn His way, and the mightiest effectiveness in His service; and to His name will be all the glory.