God’s Fellow-workers

We are God’s fellow-workers.—1 Corinthians 3:9.

1. The characteristic Greek tendency to factions was threatening to rend the Corinthian Church, and each faction was swearing by a favourite teacher. St. Paul uses the words of the text to emphasize the truth that in the process of teaching and saving men God’s work links itself with man’s, and God’s work is so much mightier and more wonderful than man’s that it is idle to weigh the work of one human labourer against that of another, after the fashion of these Corinthian sectaries. We might just as well pick out tiny shells in the cement binding the stones of a minster and divide ourselves into factions to champion the architectural honour due to the several tenants of each particular primeval shell, or select striking portions of oak carving and divide ourselves into factions to champion the artistic possibilities of the several acorns that evolved such magnificent material. A rational being has not time to think of these infinitesimal questions. He wishes to save up his tribute of honour for the genius who planned arch and spire, and dreamt out flowered screen and stall, and guided the whole to its many-sided perfection. God’s true labourers will be rewarded, not by the reckless praise and short-sighted judgments of men, but by Him who counts them allies, and in the strength of whose gift all right work must be done.

2. Startled by the boldness of the expression of the text, as if it verged on profanity, interpreters have been found to give it a different meaning—“fellow-labourers under God,” “fellow-workers in God’s field.” But this is not justified by the language used. The meaning of St. Paul’s words is “We are at work with God Himself.” And to the bold idea of joint labour with God there is added the idea of dependence. “We are God’s day-labourers, working with Him.” It is His to pay the workmen, and to value their labour. For is it not His Church, His field, His house? It is to a Divine possession that the workers put their hand. What gravity attaches to such labour! To cultivate a field the harvest of which is God’s! To build the house which God Himself is to inhabit! God alone can estimate such labour, and He will not fail to do so. These are the ideas in the Apostle’s mind when he says: “We are God’s fellow-workers.”

3. The principle embodied is a very wide one, and it applies in all regions of life and activity, intellectual, scholastic, philanthropic, social. Wherever men are thinking God’s thoughts and trying to carry into effect any phase or side of God’s manifold purposes of good and blessing to the world, there it is true. Every man who is trying to make men understand God’s thought, whether it is expressed in creation, or whether it is written in history, or whether it is graven in half-obliterated letters on the constitution of human nature,—every man who, in any region of society or life, is seeking to effect the great designs of the universal loving Father—can take to himself, in the measure and according to the manner of his special activity, the great encouragement of the text, and feel that he, too, is a fellow-helper to the truth and a fellow-worker with God.

The apse of Amiens is the first virgin perfect work—Parthenon also in that sense—of Gothic Architecture. Who built it, shall we ask? God, and Man—is the first and most true answer. The stars in their courses built it, and the nations. Greek Athena labours here—and Roman Father Jove, and Guardian Mars. The Gaul labours here, and the Frank: knightly Norman—mighty Ostrogoth—and wasted anchorite of Idumea. The actual Man who built it scarcely cared to tell you he did so; nor do the historians brag of him. Any quantity of heraldries of knaves and fainéants you may find in what they call their “history”: but this is probably the first time you ever read the name of Robert of Luzarches. I say he “scarcely cared”—we are not sure that he cared at all. He signed his name nowhere that I can hear of. You may perhaps find some recent initials cut by English remarkable visitors, desirous of immortality, here and there about the edifice, but Robert the builder—or at least the Master of building, cut his on no stone of it.1 [Note: Ruskin, The Bible of Amiens (Works, xxxiii. 131).]

I

We are Fellow-workers with One Another

The men who had ministered at Corinth, and around whose names factions were forming, differed in their gifts. St. Paul was the wisest master-builder who dealt with massive fundamentals. The elaboration of his artistic successors would not have counted for much without Pauline teaching for corner and foundation-stone. Some people would have liked to see more paint, gilding, embellishment on his granite. The task of Apollos was chiefly one of garniture, useful and fitted to attract, but vain without the bulwark of well-tested logic behind and beneath it. Gifts are diverse no less than the crowns which shall recompense the faithful use of gifts, but the work is one.

Convenience, that admirable branch system from the main line of self-interest, makes us all fellow-helpers in spite of adverse resolutions. It is probable that no speculative or theological hatred would be ultimately strong enough to resist the persuasive power of convenience: that a latitudinarian baker, whose bread was honourably free from alum, would command the custom of any dyspeptic Puseyite; that an Arminian with the toothache would prefer a skilful Calvinistic dentist to a bungler stanch against the doctrines of Election and Final Perseverance, who would be likely to break the tooth in his head; and that a Plymouth Brother, who had a well-furnished grocery shop in a favourable vicinage, would occasionally have the pleasure of furnishing sugar or vinegar to orthodox families that found themselves unexpectedly “out of” these indispensable commodities.2 [Note: George Eliot, Janet’s Repentance.]

There was a story that when the Anglo-Catholic Library was being discussed, Mr. Keble said to Dr. Moberly, “Well, you shall undertake the Anglo part and I the Catholic, and we will fight over the hyphen.”3 [Note: C. A. E. Moberly, Dulce Domum, 82.]

(1) In the building of Solomon’s Temple there were counted out by the king seventy thousand men for the sole purpose of bearing burdens. No doubt this grew irksome to these men, and they would many a time wish for some other work on the structure, and perhaps envy the men who were skilful to work in gold, and in silver, in brass, in iron, in purple, in blue, and in crimson. But without them the Temple could never have been built. Their work was absolutely essential. And so it seems that in the building of the spiritual temple, many have been counted out by the king just to bear burdens. Tedious and wearisome as their lots are, yet nothing they do that makes for spiritual growth, purity of life, or cleanness of soul, can fail to subserve God’s great purpose of erecting a world-wide spiritual temple upon this sin-stained world.

There was a sharp discussion the other day in a gentleman’s kitchen. One speaker said to another, “I am ashamed of you; we ought not to be in the same house together; you are common and vulgar-looking, besides being scratched and chipped all over. Look at me; there is not a flaw upon all my surface; my beauty is admired; my place in the house is a place of honour.” The other speaker was not boisterous, there was no resentment in the tone of the reply: “It is true that you are beautiful, and that I am very common, but that is not the only difference between us. See how you are cared for; you are protected by a glass shade; you are dusted with a brush made of the softest feathers; everybody in approaching you is warned of your delicacy. It is very different with me; whenever water is wanted I am taken to the well; when servants are done with me they almost fling me down; I am used for all kinds of work; and there never was a scullery-maid in the house who did not think herself good enough to speak of me with contempt.” It is so with men. Some of us live under glass shades; others of us are as vessels in common wear; but we could not change places; each must do his proper work, and each will have his appropriate reward.1 [Note: J. Parker.]

Is it the work that makes life great and true?

Or the true soul that, working as it can,

Does faithfully the task it has to do,

And keepeth faith alike with God and man?

Ah! well; the work is something; the same gold

Or brass is fashioned now into a coin,

Now into fairest chalice that shall hold

To panting lips the sacramental wine:

Here the same marble forms a cattle-trough

For brutes by the wayside to quench their thirst,

And there a god emerges from the rough

Unshapely block—yet they were twins at first.

One pool of metal in the melting pot

A sordid, or a sacred thought inspires;

And of twin marbles from the quarry brought

One serves the earth, one glows with altar-fires.

There’s something in high purpose of the soul

To do the highest service to its kind;

There’s something in the art that can unroll

Secrets of beauty shaping in the mind.

Yet he who takes the lower room, and tries

To make his cattle-trough with honest heart,

And could not frame the god with gleaming eyes,

As nobly plays the more ignoble part.

And maybe, as the higher light breaks in

And shows the meaner task he has to do,

He is the greater that he strives to win

Only the praise of being just and true.

For who can do no thing of sovran worth

Which men shall praise, a higher task may find,

Plodding his dull round on the common earth,

But conquering envies rising in the mind.

And God works in the little as the great

A perfect work, and glorious over all—

Or in the stars that choir with joy elate,

Or in the lichen spreading on the wall.1 [Note: Walter C. Smith, “Work and Spirit.”]

(2) Besides seventy thousand men to bear burdens for the Temple, there were told off eighty thousand men to hew stone and wood in the mountains. These men had a task both laborious and uninviting. Although the Temple!, could never have been built without them, yet the pleasure was denied them of seeing, while they worked, the great and glorious edifice arise on Mount Moriah. And so, to-day, the Lord has His hewers of wood and stone in the mountains. To them is given hard and unresponsive tasks. They labour all the day, and catch no glimpse of the House that is being built for Jehovah, helped by their labour. But still, without them, the House could never have been built.

The close sympathy between the Scotch people and the Scotch gentry in most of the national struggles has been one great cause of that admirable firmness of national character which learnt at last to dispense with leadership. In Ireland, in spite of adverse circumstances, this attachment between land-lord and tenant in many particular instances was undoubtedly formed, but in general there could be no real confidence between the classes. When the people awoke to political life, they found their natural leaders their antagonists; they were compelled to look for other chiefs, and they often found them in men who were inferior in culture, in position, and in character, who sought their suffrages for private ends, and who won them by fulsome flattery, false rhetoric, and exaggerated opinions.1 [Note: W. E. H. Lecky, A History of Ireland, i. 280.]

From Bellinzona (after a day or two’s excursion to Locarno) Ruskin drove to the head of the lake, and took the steamer for Baveno and the Isola Bella. Writing thence to his father (July 8), Ruskin mentions a political observation which made a great impression on him, for he used it more than once as an illustration in his economic writings:—

“No pity nor respect can be felt for these people, who have sunk and remain sunk, merely by idleness and wantonness in the midst of all blessings and advantages: who cannot so much as bank out—or in—a mountain stream, because, as one of their priests told me the other day, every man always acts for himself: they will never act together and do anything at common expense for the common good; but every man tries to embank his own land and throw the stream upon his neighbours; and so the stream masters them all and sweeps its way down all the valley in victory. This I heard from the curate of a mountain chapel at Bellinzona, when I went every evening to draw his garden.”2 [Note: E. T. Cook, The Life of Ruskin, i. 517.]

(3) There were men skilful to work in gold and silver, brass, iron, stone, linen, purple, and crimson, and to grave all manner of gravings and devise all manner of devices. These were the outstanding men of genius, of whom only a few were needed.

To Sir Christopher Wren belongs the undying honour of having designed the great cathedral of St. Paul, with its world-famous dome, in London. But Sir Christopher Wren could never in a million years have built the dome alone. He was dependent upon the humblest labourers who toiled upon the hidden base, or reared the turrets of the mighty structure, as they were dependent upon him. In so far as they used to the uttermost their talents and opportunities, to them is due a full share of the glory.1 [Note: C. B. Keenleyside.]

One day at Perth Bishop Wilkinson (late of Truro) noticed a thin-faced boy looking as if he wanted to speak to him, and he went up to him, asking if the boy wished to speak to him. “No, sir,” said the boy, “only I sing in the same choir as you are in.” The Bishop’s friends laughed at the boy’s idea of his association with the Bishop in the Church, but the boy was not laughed at by the Bishop.2 [Note: Life of Bishop Wilkinson, ii. 288.]

If The world itself might be redeemed by hopefulness and organized co-operation. Buskin may have lacked the practical gift; but he was possessed by the vision:—

(To his Mother) “Verona, June 18.—Yesterday, it being quite cool, I went for a walk, and as I came down from a rather quiet hillside a mile or two out of town, I passed a house where the women were at work spinning the silk off the cocoons. There was a sort of whirring sound as in an English mill; but at intervals they sang a long sweet chant, all together, lasting about two minutes, then pausing a minute, and then beginning again. It was good and tender music, and the multitude of voices prevented any sense of failure, so that it was all very lovely and sweet, and like the things that I mean to try to bring to pass.”3 [Note: E. T. Cook, The Life of Ruskin, ii. 164.]

II

We are Fellow-workers for God

1. Every Christian man and woman is invested with the power, and is therefore burdened with the honourable obligation to work for God. Man’s communion with his Maker is not only a fellowship of worship but also a fellowship of service.

What were Ruskin’s methods in his other and more general manners, when he had the single view of making himself understood and said what he desired in the best words he could find for it? What was his secret? He would have told us, I think, what he reported Turner as saying, “I know of no genius but the genius of hard work.” There is no writer who gives a stronger impression of ease than Cardinal Newman—a great master of simple and lucid English, greater in these particular respects, if we take the whole body of their writings, than Ruskin. Yet even Newman said: “I have been obliged to take great pains with everything I have written, and I often write chapters over and over again, besides innumerable corrections and interlined additions.” Ruskin’s method was the same. The search for the right word, for the fitting sentence, was often long; and paragraphs and chapters were written over and over again before they satisfied him. And this applies equally to his most simple writing, such as is to be found, for instance, in The Elements of Drawing; and to his most elaborate passages, such as the exordiums and perorations in Modern Painters, The Seven Lamps, and The Stones of Venice. He carried on the process to the stage of proofs, revises, and re-revises. Facsimiles of pages re-written on the printed proof are included in the Library Edition, and in this connection Dr. Furnivall gave me an anecdote. To Ruskin’s father the publisher came one day exhibiting a thickly scored final revise and explaining that continuance in such practices would absorb all the author’s profits. “Don’t let my son know,” said the old gentleman; “John must have his things as he likes them; pay him whatever would become due, apart from corrections, and send in a separate bill for them to me.” Few authors, it may be feared, are blessed with so indulgent a parent.1 [Note: E. T. Cook, The Life of Ruskin, i. 358.]

Be strong!

We are not here to play, to dream, to drift.

We have hard work to do, and loads to lift.

Shun not the struggle; face it. ’Tis God’s gift.2 [Note: Maltbie D. Babcock.]

2. There is a sense in which every man is a worker for God. We cannot help fulfilling His purposes. All things serve Him, and He maketh even the wickedness of men work out His will.

(1) Through human agency the ancient miracle of creation is repeated. One great teaching of modern knowledge says nothing above a certain low level of excellence comes by natural law unaided by man; all best things in the world of nature are the result of his thought and toil. It is true that man can do absolutely nothing without God. He can create no new forces. All the material with which he works Nature has furnished. But what can he not do with it, and what has he done? He has modified climate, made the rivers change their course and even the ocean its shore, made forests grow and made new ground for them to grow in, made the parched ground a pool and the thirsty land springs of water. Eight hundred years ago there was no such country as the Holland of to-day; God had not made it. He made it possible, but man had to give it actual frame and form. The map of Holland is not even now what it was at the beginning of the last century; it has 120,000 more acres of land than it had then.

I was deeply impressed by what a gardener once said to me concerning his work. “I feel, sir,” he said, “when I am growing the flowers, or rearing the vegetables, that I am having a share in creation!” I thought it a very noble way of regarding his work.1 [Note: J. H. Jowett.]

(2) In the realm of outward nature man works for God. It is man’s part in evolution that has developed the moss-rose out of the wild-briar, the fine wheat out of the wild grasses. And in the animal kingdom the same thing is seen still more strikingly. The famous breeds of horses and cattle are man’s creation—by development. Compare your sheep-dog or your setter with the wild canine stock. Association with man has evolved in them something almost of human intelligence and feeling. God gives man all things in the rough, as it were, and leaves him to develop them further; and without man’s part faithfully performed, there could not be a loaf of bread evolved out of a wheat field, or a woollen coat out of a sheep’s fleece.

Nature knew enough to make textile fibres, but never knew enough to weave a piece of cotton. It never brought out a yard of broadcloth. Nature knew how to make a worm, and the worm knew how to make a garment of death for itself, but nature never made silk. Nature made iron, but never made a tool—not one; and yet, what are the hands of man without tools? Men could not have risen above barbarism but for them.2 [Note: H. W. Beecher.]

(3) In his own training and saving, in the work of developing personal faculty and character, man is a worker with God. Man’s own will and effort constitute one of the factors in his progress. You remember the little child’s quaint answer to the question, “Who made you?” Said she, “God made me so long, and I growed the rest myself.” “Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength!” The little girl’s answer touched the very heart of the matter. We are made, intellectually and morally, just about so long; that is not our doing—“it is he that hath made us and not we ourselves”—but, after all, there is a good deal that we have to “grow ourselves” and that we can grow ourselves.

Theodore Parker used to say that man’s life was only about three parts out of the hundred freedom, the rest, necessity. That is not much to claim for free-will—the veriest necessarian might concede that much! But then, even three per cent, of moral freedom, if made the most of, and constantly turned over, may mount up gradually to a considerable increase of that stock-in-trade with which man started. That little three per cent, of free effort has brought man from skins to broadcloth; from the wigwam to the modern house; from the rough tradition chanted by the camp fire to the printed book; from the rude torch to the electric light. In religion, it has brought man from the instinct of fetish-worship to the communion of spiritual prayer; and in morality, from the measureless revenge of the savage to the measured law “for a tooth only a tooth,” and on to the unmeasured law of forgiveness “unto seventy times seven”! In a word it is that little free part of man’s own, even if it be only three per cent., which, not buried in the napkin of indolence or fatalism, but put out to interest in busy striving life, has brought man from savagism up to civilization, and in which lie the possibilities of further progress still—the potentialities of the hero, sage and saint in this world, to say nothing of the angel in the life to come.1 [Note: B. Herford.]

(4) It is through men that God helps and saves men and creates His new heavens and His new earth. Out of humanity come the Divine helpers of humanity. God in the world reconciling it to Himself means in human life God in Christ and God in men whom Christ inspires, God choosing and using men to be the instruments of His purpose, the messengers of His mercy and grace, the doers of His word. There was no want of faith, or reverence, or humility in Martin Luther, and yet he could say in his own bold, earnest way, “God needs strong men; He cannot get along without them.”

The highest of all privileges is to share with God the work of re-creation. There are no flowers so winsome as those you have grown in your own garden, and there is no life that gives you such joy and such delicacy of spiritual food as the life you have helped to make beautiful by your own heart’s blood. When you have worked with the Lord in the creation of another man’s joy, a most delicately flavoured joy visits your own heart. Let us regard every man as a possible sphere of service, and set to work to turn the untilled field into a garden.1 [Note: J. H. Jowett.]

Wherefore hast Thou withdrawn Thee from my sight,

O Shepherd? Yesterday in glad delight

I walked serene, rejoicing in the light.

O Shepherd, Shepherd, Shepherd, seek Thy sheep!

But yesterday my soul was all aflame

If but the faintest whisper of Thy name

Ineffable to my rapt spirit came.

O Shepherd, Shepherd, Shepherd, seek Thy sheep!

The waters that refreshed me yesterday,

The sweet green fields that cheered me on my way

Afford no comfort to my soul to-day.

O Shepherd, Shepherd, Shepherd, seek Thy sheep!

Around me the fair world is bathed in light,

All nature breathes to God her calm delight;

And I, alone, stumble in blackest night.

O Shepherd, Shepherd, Shepherd, seek Thy sheep!

Why dost Thou leave me on the mountain side

When all my soul cries out for Thee to guide,

Desiring nought in earth or heaven beside?

O Shepherd, Shepherd, Shepherd, seek Thy sheep!

Why dost Thou leave me thus? If Thou art near,

Succour me speedily. Each step I fear.

Oh let Thy voice fall on my straining ear.

O Shepherd, Shepherd, Shepherd, seek Thy sheep!

Thy voice——? Nay, but across the lonely track

A faint cry from a soul in bitter lack.

Is it Thy voice?—Shepherd, I turn me back

And hasten, joyful, to seek out Thy sheep.2 [Note: Margaret Blaikie, Songs by the Way, 39.]

III

We are Fellow-workers with God

We are fellow-workers, and we are fellow-workers for God. But, more than that, we are fellow-workers with God. It is God’s field we are tilling, it is God’s house we are building together, and God is with us in the work. He and we till the field and build the house together. We are God’s fellow-workers.

“God’s fellow-workers!” What a title! How august the dignity! What distinction it confers upon us! The conjunction is almost incredible. God the eternal, infinite. The omniscient and omnipotent! Man, crushed before the moth, chilled and smitten by the November fog! And yet these two terms, significant of frailty and almightiness, are brought into this marvellous association, and we are described as “fellow-workers”! We do not wonder that John Calvin, in seeking an exposition of these words, describes one side of the partnership as “composed of mere worms of the dust.” But a worm in conjunction with the Almighty becomes a powerful fellow-worker.

Is there anything more fragile than the incandescent mantle? You blow upon it and it falls into dust. It will not bear the rough touch even of the gentlest finger. And yet this flimsy substance can co-operate with a tremendous energy and contribute in the production of dazzling light. And here we are, mere children of the dust, frail and flimsy as this mantle. And yet, when we are in league with the Almighty, we become exceedingly serviceable, and fruitful in great things. We can be fellow-workers with God; such a dignity ought, to make us walk with sanctified erectness.1 [Note: J. H. Jowett.]

When a mother says to her little child who is carrying some little burden from one room to another, “You are helping me,” what stature it gives to the little soul, and what a sense of dignity and place in life’s affairs.

Suppose a great painter, a Raphael or a Turner, taking a little boy that cleaned his brushes, and saying to him, “Come into my studio, and I will let you do a bit of work upon my picture.” Suppose an aspirant, an apprentice in any walk of life, honoured by being permitted to work along with some one who was recognized all over the world as being at the very top of that special profession. Would it not be a feather in the boy’s cap all his life? And would he not think it the greatest honour that ever had been done him that he was allowed to co-operate, in however inferior a fashion, with such an one? Jesus Christ says to us, “Come and work here side by side with Me.”1 [Note: A. Maclaren.]

1. As we are joint-labourers with God, we must learn the lesson of mutual dependence.

(1) We are dependent on God.—We cannot do the smallest part of our work without His co-operation. Here is the secret of humility. Alike in the development of our own inner lives and in our ministry for others, we must be destitute of prosperity and progress, if it were not that God is working in us to will and to do of His good pleasure. So let us bid farewell to every shred and vestige of pride. If it were not for our Divine ally, we should be shamed and driven in dishonour from the field.

When first the greatness of the scientific thought of evolution burst upon the wondering mind of our time, there was an idea that it would almost cut away the ground from under religion. Perhaps this feeling was never expressed—and at the same time its shallowness exposed—better than in the saying of Frances Power Cobbe. “It is a curious thing,” said Miss Cobbe, “that as soon as men find out how anything is done, they should immediately rush to the conclusion that God did not do it.” But that idea is pretty well past. God’s part in Evolution becomes only more evident the more the subject is examined. We cannot get that idea of evolution to work, we cannot keep it working, without recognizing, behind all things and in all things, some mighty, mysterious power and energy, which, the more we look at it, the more we have to think of it as life and will, and to call it by some name of God.2 [Note: B. Herford.]

(2) God is dependent on us.—In his controversy with the late John Stuart Mill, the French philosopher Comte said, “My Deity, that is, Humanity, has this advantage over yours: He needs help.” The English philosopher met the charge by saying, “The theist’s God is not omnipotent; He can be helped, great worker though He be.” What Mill described as “the feeling of helping God “has always been cherished by the most sincere and earnest believers in the power of God over all.

Lord, when we pray, “Thy kingdom come!”

Then fold our hands without a care

For souls whom Thou hast died to save,

We do but mock Thee with our prayer.

Thou couldst have sent an angel band

To call Thine erring children home;

And thus through heavenly ministries

On earth Thy kingdom might have come.

But since to human hands like ours

Thou hast committed work divine,

Shall not our eager hearts make haste

To join their feeble powers with Thine?

To word and work shall not our hands

Obedient move, nor lips be dumb,

Lest through our sinful love of ease,

Thy kingdom should delay to come?

2. As we are fellow-workers with God let us work in harmony with God and by God’s method.

(1) It behoves us to work in harmony with Him. Co-operation with God is a question of knowing, of being conscious of it. It is impossible to divorce ourselves from God. In spite of us He will realize His will in us. He cannot overcome our will, but even through our opposing will He will accomplish His purpose. But we may be willing fellow-workers. It is the difference between opposition to God’s will, together with the shamefaced confession that we cannot help doing His work, and willing co-operation with His will, together with the consciousness of being recognized by Him as fellow-workers.

Says Ruskin, “You will find it needful to live, if it be with success, according to God’s Law; and the first uttered article in it is, ‘In the sweat of thy face thou shalt eat bread.’ ”1 [Note: E. T. Cook, The Life of Ruskin, ii. 329.]

The conduct of life becomes like the experience of the brave Nansen in his attempt to reach the Pole. Men had struggled northward through weary days from the Greenland side, only to find at the end of each day’s march that they had been swept farther south by a current which moved the whole pack of ice beneath their feet. Then the Norwegian explorer made himself a labourer together with God, through the Siberian approach, and gave himself to the mighty sweep of the polar current, so that the law which he had discovered bore him towards the realization of his dream. It is the same with every honest desire to do right. The current of God’s laws is under you; the movement of things is with you; you are a labourer together with God.

(2) If we are working in willing co-operation with God, we will be content to work by God’s method. And if we wish to know what God’s method is, we have but to look at Jesus Christ. Now we know that the method of God for Jesus Christ involved self-sacrifice, pain, weariness, utter self-oblivious devotion, as well as gentleness, tenderness, infinite pity, and love running over. If we felt that side by side with us, like two sailors hauling on one rope, “the Servant of the Lord “was toiling, would it not burn up all our selfishness, and light up all our indifference, and make us spend ourselves in His service?

Men’s lives bear the aspects of deserts and wildernesses, and God wants them to be as beautiful as the Garden of Eden—aye, more beautiful. The “paradise of God” in the book of Revelation is a far more lovely garden than the Garden of Eden; the first was the garden of innocence, the latter is the garden of holiness. Man fell from innocence; he may attain unto the garden of holiness; but the attainment is made possible by the awful happenings in the Garden of Gethsemane. Now if we are to be fellow-workers in creating the garden of holiness we too must know something of the agonies of Gethsemane. We must know “the fellowship of his sufferings.” We can do nothing of this high gardening except through the ministry of sacrificial blood. When we are willing to bleed, in order that other lives may be beautiful, we shall be sharing the travail of the whole creation. It is no use playing at spiritual gardening; it is a thing of agony and bloody sweat.1 [Note: J. H. Jowett.]

Whose is the speech

That moves the voices of this lonely beech?

Out of the long West did this wild wind come—

Oh strong and silent! And the tree was dumb,

Ready and dumb until

The dumb gale struck it on the darkened hill.

Two memories,

Two powers, two promises, two silences

Closed in this cry, closed in these thousand leaves

Articulate. This sudden hour retrieves

The purpose of the past,

Separate, apart—embraced, embraced at last.

“Whose is the word?

Is it I that spake? Is it thou? Is it I that heard?”

“Thine earth was solitary; yet I found thee!”

“Thy sky was pathless, but I caught, I bound thee,

Thou visitant divine.”

“O thou my Voice, the word was thine.” “Was thine.”1 [Note: Alice Meynell.]

3. The fact that our work is conjoined with the Divine is the root of motive. It ought ever to be an adequate inspiration to us that the work is God’s, and that He has called us into His fellowship. Is not the motive that stirs in His heart and moves His stupendous activities without ceasing sufficient for us? What is good enough to engage the majestic energies of God is surely good enough for us. Does the work that beseems His matchless sovereignty need commendation from us, or the high seal of our rank and prestige? Into the work He touches with His sceptred hand on the one side, and which we are permitted to touch with our feeble hands of flesh on the other, He reflects all the glory of His attributes.

It is said that when Phidias was preparing the figures for the Acropolis, the work was perfect even in the smallest details, although these figures were to stand upon a background so high that nobody could see them. A sculptor was working at the hair of one of them with minute fidelity, when some one said to him, “What is the use of that expenditure of time and labour? Nobody will ever see your work.” The workman replied, “Yes, the gods will see it!”

Christ, by Thine own darkened hour

Live within my heart and brain!

Let my hands not slip the rein.

Ah, how long ago it is

Since a comrade rode with me!

Now a moment let me see

Thyself, lonely in the dark,

Perfect, without wound or Mark 1 [Note: Padraic Colum.]

4. The fact that the work is God’s is our strong encouragement. He who works for the redemption of men from the deepest evil of their life will not long want the sign that God works. The sign is so universal that we have perhaps ceased to call it a sign.

A short time ago I saw a well-kept flower-garden blooming in the little angle of ground formed at the junction of two railway lines. The helpless flowers were thriving there in spite of the terrible forces that came so near them on every side. If you were to put an untaught savage inside the garden hedge and let him hear the screaming engines and see the files of carriages or the trucks laden with coal, timber, and iron converging towards this fairy oasis, he would be ready to say, “These beautiful things will be torn to shreds in a moment.” But behind the garden fences there are the lines of strong, faithful steel keeping each engine and carriage and truck in its appointed place, and though the air vibrates with destructive force, and pansy, primrose, and geranium live in a world of tremors, not a silken filament is snapped, and not a petal falls untimely to the earth. In the very angle of these forces the frailest life is unharmed. So with the fine spiritual husbandries that foster faith in the souls around us. The air hurtles with fierce hostilities. The mechanisms of diabolic temptation encroach on every side upon our work. Public-house, gaming-club, and ill-ordered home, threaten disasters of which we do not like to think. The air quivers with anger of demons. Yet the work is God’s, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. In the very angle of these demoniac forces the work shall thrive, for the hidden lines of His protecting power are round about it.2 [Note: T. G. Selby.]

Just where you stand in the conflict,

There is your place!

Just where you think you are useless,

Hide not your face!

God placed you there for a purpose,

Whate’er it be;

Think you He has chosen you for it:

Work loyally.

Gird on your armour! be faithful

At toil or rest,

Whiche’er it be, never doubting

God’s way is best.

Out in the fight, or on picket,

Stand firm and true;

This is the work which your Master

Gives you to do.

5. The fact that we are linked with God in His service is our pledge of victory. If God works with us, success is sure. If God is doing this work, then God’s strength, God’s skill, God’s knowledge are employed upon it. We are no longer discouraged and enfeebled by the sense of our own incapacity, our own ignorance and inexperience, our own faint hearts and feeble hands. There is beside us an inexhaustible fountain of ability, from which we can draw. It is God’s work. Therefore it must be triumphant. There is no place for misgiving or despondency. No sense of personal frailty, no calculation of opposing odds, no menaces of approaching evil, no symptoms of immediate failure—none of these can appal us God’s work is eternal. Nothing can prevail against it. There may be temporary defeats, partial fallings back. Men may come and men may go. But what then? “All flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away; but the word of the Lord endureth for ever.”

A noble cause cannot of itself make a man noble. We must despair of growing great, unless we can feel that we are given to the cause to work for it, and not it to work for us. In the old torch races of Pan, the rule was that each runner should hold his torch as long as it kept its light, but when he flagged he must hand it to another who stood ready girded to follow up the race. And so it must be with us. We must recognize the great end of all this panting, and running, and toiling, not that you or I should reach the goal, and be rich or honoured in men’s mouths, but that the torch of truth that was put into our hands when we started should reach the people at the end all alight with truth as when we took it. Let it be our hands, if we can, that bring it there, and then the honour shall be ours; but that must not be our end, and when we see it sinking and going out, let no petty conceit or unfledged pride keep us from giving it to a fresher and stronger man, with a hearty Godspeed to run the next stage of the same great journey. Thus we win a broadness, and deepness, and fulness of character that sinks all little human ventures like the sea.1 [Note: Phillips Brooks, Life, 53.]

It is said that the engineer who planned the Brooklyn bridge—one of the most colossal triumphs of scientific skill in the world—was a bed-ridden invalid; and that with the help of a telescope he watched the bridge grow into shape day by day from his couch of paralysis and pain. He triumphed because the great thought in a fragile frame was conjoined with all but exhaustless capital and the illimitable labour that capital could bring into the field.2 [Note: T. G. Selby.]

I cannot do it alone,

The waves run fast and high,

And the fogs close chill around,

And the light goes out in the sky;

But I know that we two

Shall win in the end—

Jesus and I.

I cannot row it myself,

My boat on the raging sea;

But beside me sits Another

Who pulls or steers with me,

And I know that we two

Shall come safe into port—

His child and He.

Coward and wayward and weak,

I change with the changing sky;

To-day so eager and brave,

To-morrow not caring to try;

But He never gives in,

So we two shall win—

Jesus and I.

Strong and tender and true,

Crucified once for me!

He will not change, I know,

Whatever I may be!

But all He says I must do,

Ever from sin to keep free

We shall finish our course

And reach home at last—

His child and He.

God’s Fellow-workers

Literature

Darlow (J. H.), The Upward Calling, 178.

Davies (D.), Talks with Men, Women and Children, iii. 405.

Herford (B.), Anchors of the Soul, 77.

Hodgkin (T.), Human Progress and the Inward Light, 42.

Jackson (G.), Memoranda Paulina, 225, 230.

James (J. A.), Sermons, iii. 158.

Jones (W. B.), The Peace of God, 243.

Keenleyside (C. B.), God’s Fellow-workers, 79.

Lightfoot (J. B.), Ordination Addresses, 214.

Macgilvray (W.), The Ministry of the Word, 83.

Maclaren (A.), Expositions: 1 and 2 Corinthians, 30.

Menzies (G.), Pictorial Sermons in Industries, 48, 110.

Peabody (F. G.), Mornings in the College Chapel, ii. 140.

Percival (J.), Sermons at Rugby, 189.

Percival (J.), Some Helps for School Life, 216.

Selby (T. G.), The Lesson of a Dilemma, 365.

Smellie (A.), In the Hour of Silence, 341.

Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, xxvii. (1881), No. 1602.

Stalker (J.), The New Song, 38.

Vaughan (C. J.), Memorials of Harrow Sundays, 437.

Wells (J.), Bible Images, 239.

Wilson (S. L.), Helpful Words for Daily Life, 362.

British Congregationalist, Sept. 15, 1910, p. 208 (Cadman).

Christian Age, xxxiv. 258 (Diggle).

Christian World Pulpit, vi. 255 (Marling); viii. 329 (Beecher); xix. 104 (Woodford); xxix. 132 (Beecher); li. 364 (Armitage); liv. 70 (Snell); lx. 257 (Hunter).

Church of England Magazine, x. 417 (Holland).

Church of England Pulpit, xxxii. 28 (Reed).

Church Family Newspaper, Dec. 31, 1909, p. 1071 (James).

Examiner, Dec. 22, 1904, p. 600 (Jowett).