“EVERY CHRISTIAN A MISSIONARY.”
TO BE a missionary is easy enough, says John G. Woolley, in The Voice, but to be a Christian! There is “the business end” of that topic. Jesus Christ was what God would have been if He had been a son, and a brother, and a friend, and a neighbor, and a carpenter, and a Jew, and a Roman subject, in the year of the world 4,000. A Christian ought to be what Jesus would be, in the relationships and occupations of a common man, in the year of our Lord 1898. And that is “quite a chore;” you can’t do it while you “hold up” a man or a market. You can’t do it while you “run” a dirty party, or soil yourself with usury, or truckle to a lie, for temporary ends. You can’t do it by working at it nights and Sundays, and holding a convention once a year. But every Christian ought to be a Christian. A missionary is one who is sent. The word is from the Latin mittere—to send. We are all sent into the great world; and into the smaller world which we call our country; and into the smaller world which we call our environment; and the still smaller world which we call our business; and into the still smaller world which we call our home. And every life is sent with reference to other lives. To realize this fact and live for all, is to be a Christian and a missionary. To realize it and live for self, is to be an infidel and a traitor. To ignore it, is to be a sot. To deny it, is to be a fool. And whether fool or sot or traitor, infidel or saint, we are all born missionaries, the only question being whom we serve. A missionary is a messenger, not a manager. As liberty is the medium of spiritual life, testimony is the instrument of spiritual power, and time is not of the essence of the undertaking. Testimony exerts force very gently and very slowly, but coercion would be fatal to liberty—and equally to progress; for every life we move upon is in the circuit of other currents which we can not calculate and do not understand and history teaches, all too plainly, that even when we are surest and proudest of our own opinion, we do well to end our labors as we do our prayers: “Thy will, not mine, be done.” So, then, after all, the topic, at its simplest, is: Every Christian ought to be a witness to the truth of Jesus Christ. We can not be precisely like Him. We can not be precisely like each other. It would not do for us to be alike. Dr. Bonar’s testimony might be worthless in a place where that of Joe Hess would be conclusive, and vice versa. Christian witnesses, who are “the light of the world,” differ “as one star differeth from another star in glory”—but not in truth. Tho, to be sure, truth is relative in the moral world; starlight and manlight get their color from what is consuming in their bodies; and as the grosser elements are burnt out, the ray whitens and the spectrum simplifies; and so a man’s influence—which is the shine of his character and a large part of his testimony—often changes from year to year, according as he burns, while his truth changes not at all. So much for the missionary. The message must be true, as per the man. We often hear the statement that illustration is not argument; but in mission work the life of the missionary is the “demonstration of the Spirit.” A man is not fit to teach a truth of the Spirit which his own practise contradicts. A shrew can not teach gentleness; a bigot can not teach tolerance; a tippler can not teach abstinence; a trimmer can not teach “the truth as it is in Jesus.” The man must be true; the message must be manifest in the man; and lastly, and most difficult, and, from the reformer’s point of view, most important to be urged in these days, is, “The field is the world.” We have risked the life of the church and made light of the nation’s honor by permitting the silly, wicked, infamous assumption that the mission of Christ was restricted to certain people, certain days, or certain places,—that there was at least one wide sphere of life into which a Christian, as such, had no business to go; that while it was his duty and his privilege to be white, to be clean, to be holy, yet that he might do his politics with dirty hands, and dirty agents, and dirty purposes. All this time saying to one another, “Go ye into all the world, and preach the Gospel.” That can not mean, Go to China, or Africa. It means, Go where the Spirit of God—visible duty—or the act of God—force of circumstances—leads or drives you. And wherever you are, preach the Gospel.