gain of one or a loss of one in the report to the District Conference, I have no idea w hat it is. I’m thankful I have met few pastors of this stripe, but I wish it were possible to wipe the few I ’ve met off the earth or, at least, off the Conference Rosters. They have no business in the m in istry. In the m ind of God we are not statistics, we are not numbers, we are not non-entities, we are not merely one of the more than 2,500,000,000 hum an beings on earth. The Gospel tells us, “You have an identity, an irreplace able value in the heart of God. You are a name, not a number. You are God’s child, not merely His creation, if you have pu t your faith in His Son, Jesus Christ, as your Saviour. You are not the object of His casual concern; you are the beneficiary of His gracious, eternal, compassionate, constraining love. You m ay be a mere social security number and tax payer to the government, a stamp on the ballot to the politician, a statistic to labor, an I-Q finding to the educator. You may be—or seem to be—reduced to a nameless, voiceless non-entity elsewhere but, to God, you are precious beyond computation. The hairs of your head are numbered. The steps of your feet are ordered of the Lord. The path of your destiny is lovingly, carefully marked out, by Him. Everything th a t happens to you, if you are His child, is an ingredient in the fine and blessed feast which awaits you at His banquet table. W hat a wonderful, exciting thing it is to realize this! How it enriches a hum an soul to realize this relationship he sustains to God! How meaningful it makes a Christian life to realize th a t God has given him a new nature, a new name, a new and unique mission which he, and he alone, can perform! And how pitiful, how shameful it is to see Christians standing on the sidelines, adm iring the ex ploits of some religious leader, saying, “Look what he can do! I wish I could do something!” Well, you can! You must, or your Christian profession becomes a rancid, wretched mockery! The youngest girl of a large fam ily once said, “No body seems to w ant me. I’m a cripple and in everybody’s way.” As she spoke she passed a book store and her eyes fell on the words, “The Lord hath need of him ”—a refer ence to the little-donkey on which Jesus rode into Jerusa lem. “Jesus once needed a donkey,” she said, “so perhaps He can use me, a cripple. I ’ll ask H im .” T hat was the be ginning of a forty-year m inistry as a Bible woman and, when she died, she was loved and mourned by hundreds and went to claim a glorious crown. It’s a wonderful th ing to happen. A Christian goes about his daily living, keeping out of trouble, abstaining from vice and wickedness bu t not aggressively, positively useful to His Lord until, somehow, he sees th a t God has compounded in his personality a combination of qualities and interests and talents unique w ith Him. He sees th a t God has surrounded him w ith people and circumstances in a formula unduplicated since time began. He realizes th a t every day, every moment, of his time is an invitation and challenge to do w hat nobody else in history can do, because nobody else ever has looked out a t life from be hind his eyes and tasted life w ith his lips and felt life w ith his consciousness. In th a t experience . . . whether it takes a moment or a month . . . he finds his place, accepts his mission, takes up his work for God, not now as a listless chore bu t as a holy crusade. It can happen to you. I hope it w ill, today.
A traveller in England reported an amusing slip of the tongue at a railw ay station. A train was about to leave when a shrill cry from a woman calling to her husband was heard. “W ait,” she cried, “we have forgotten our non-entity cards!” She m eant to say, of course, “iden tity cards” which are required in so m any places. Amusing though her mistake m ay be, it rem inds us of some very sober facts. Great impersonal forces move over our world today, flattening out individuality, robbing us of the sense of personal significance. In politics, in labor and many other areas, the feeling is, w hat does one person count? Just take your button, pin it to your lapel and fall in line, a non-entity, dignified and identified only by a number. You even start your life th a t way, they pu t your foot in ink, stamp it on paper, give it a number and th a t is you —■# 87394 in a vast card index. You move out of the hos pital into a world increasingly stripped of personality and individuality, becoming, in m any ways, a mere statistic, an almost nameless number. It can happen to you in your church membership. If there is any worse perversion of the pastor-member rela tionship than for you or me to represent to our pastors a
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THE KING'S BUSINESS
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