The Christian Walk: Refection 2

Henry Drummond (1851-1897) was walking with a Glasgow businessman down the street one day. He saw a merchant throw a stock of round strawberry boxes into a gutter. Instantly a group of boys swooped down upon the boxes and put them on their heads as a cap. Then they lined up in military formation and marched away. “There is an idea for you,” Drummond told his friend, and out of that ‘coincidence’ grew the Boys Brigade program that God still uses to win boys to Christ.

D.L. Moody speaks of Drummond as a man who lived nearer to the Master and who sought to do His will more fully. Due to his walk, he was able to see in common events an uncommon path in fulfilling the great commission.

Our service for our fellow humans does not come from strained efforts on our part to live for them but rather from seeing Jesus doing so, and then simply making ourselves available to Him. We do so that we may be channels of His grace and power to them. This is the way in which He walked in His relationship with the Father, and it is the way in which we must walk in our relationship with Him.

Jesus said, “The Son can do nothing of Himself, but what He seeth the Father do, for what things soever He doeth, those also doeth the Son likewise (John 5:19). We, too, can do nothing but what we see the Lord Jesus doing until we see that we are helpless, and our service is nothing more than self-initiated striving. It is not ours to originate anything but simply to yield ourselves to Him to be the channel of what He initiates and carries through and to trust Him to do so through us.

In the words of Roy and Revel Hession, The Lord Jesus is for others, just as the Vine does not bear the grapes for its own refreshment but for the refreshment of others…The Lord Jesus is not alone in this. He draws redeemed men into cooperation with Himself in the outworking of His glorious purposes, and they become His branches on which His fruit is borne. Just as apart from Him the branches can do nothing of themselves, so it is that apart from them the Vine does not bear fruit. The branches cannot, however, produce or initiate the fruit; that is altogether His work! They simply bear what He produces as He lives His life again in them (1958, 132).