these methods God is not well pleased, for they mis lead God’s young folks. Full of natural wisdom, these measures savor of the flesh, and the results soon prove disconcerting and disappointing. We must turn aside at this point to declare our selves in favor o f every form of honest effort to save our young people. If Christ is preached, we therein rejoice. We have little sympathy indeed with a modem kind of “quietism,” which shuts it self away from human need, walling itself off in a kind o f quieter and holier-than-thou worship. There are some fleshly folks today so quiet, so holy, so spiritual that they are forever accusing the breth ren who are out in midstream trying to rescue the perishing. They would put the whole responsibility upon the sovereignty of God, while they enjoy their seclusive and exclusive times of worship. They need the rebuke of Charles Spurgeon, himself a great Baptist, who said, “ The difference between the Baptists and the Methodists is this: While the Bap tists are waiting on God to turn something up, the Methodists go around and turn it up.” In today’s Babel o f methods, Christian young people stand in a place of desperate need. They must be told with all boldness that God’s ways and wisdom run counter to the whole way and wisdom of the world. They must become convinced that God’s work is still done by Heaven’s “worms,” that the insignificant and the despised and the weak lings are Heaven’s hope of blessed success. Let these young people be made to see the plan and the principle of God’s working, for God’s solution is as heartening as it is concealed. Set over against the pride and power and wit of the world’s wisdom is “the foolishness of God,” which is “wiser than men,” and “ the weakness o f God,” which is “ strong er than men.” If this working principle be questioned, let the whole of our gospel scheme come into review. In Christ is embodied God’s secret weapon. All the way from glory to incarnation, to Gethsemane, and to Golgotha, His career was a self-humbling and self-chosen obedience unto death. Such was the disguise of Deity. Hidden in this “ root out of a dry ground,” with “no form nor comeliness,” was the very power of God and the wisdom of God. In His final down-stepping, He gave Himself over to be “ numbered with the transgressors” and was “ cru cified through weakness.” In that death He defeated the whole hierarchy of hell, and became to us the very power of God and the wisdom o f God. Is that mere cold theology ? Let every human worm be will ing to be “ planted together in the likeness of His death” — or, as Paul says, become “weak with Him.” Identification with Christ in His supreme weakness is the secret of all God's mighty working. It is the “ com-of-wheat” program that insures a harvest of success. DU Reprinted from CROWDED TO CHRIST , by Rev. S. E. Maxwell; Wm • G. Eerdmans Pub. Co. Used by permission.
among the nondescripts. We greatly fear that in many instances they pursue such a course not to become “willing, skillful workers”—skillful in the word of righteousness—such as Hudson Taylor re quired for China, but to avoid being among the ig norant and the unlearned. In this day of intellec- tualism, who would wish to be so extreme as to be “Dead to the world and its applause, To all the customs, fashions, laws Of those who hate the humbling Cross.” —Amy Carmichael. Have we forgotten, or do we willingly ignore the fact, that Paul and Timothy and Titus met and faced a world of Roman power and Grecian wisdom without having to use this modem term, “what it takes” ? Paul’s successors were to become “ thor oughly furnished unto all good works,” as was Joshua, by meditating day and night in the Scrip tures. Thus they waged their warware with weap ons not of the flesh, but mightily through God to the battering down of all the bulwarks of Gre cian wit and wisdom. Was it not John Wesley who said, “Give me one hundred preachers who fear nothing but sin and desire nothing but God, and I care not a straw whether they be clergymen or lay men ; such alone will shake the gates of hell and set up the kingdom of heaven on earth. God does noth ing but in answer to prayer.” After Methodism had been in the field for one hundred years and had won her greatest victories, “ the Methodist Bishops in 1840 expressed their doubts as to the expediency of establishing schools of divinity” (Ernest Gordon, in Leaven of the Sadducees). Let me be honest. Do I wish to become as far removed from “the worm” method as possible, as far as culture and learning and prestige can lift me ? Do I seek to be lettered, to be elevated, to have “what it takes” to meet the mountains of modem intellect and education on their ground? In other words, must I be clad in Saul’s armor ? Must I meet wit with wit? Or can I dare with David to crush every Goliath’s skull with one smooth stone? Such is God’s foolishness and weakness, chosen to con found the world’s splendid might; “ for it is not ‘diamond cut diamond’ here, but it is the lamb that slays the lion, and the dove that outwits the ser pent” (Charles Fox). How we feel for the Christian young people of this generation! They face an age that well-nigh worships the “ god of forces” ; they live in a world o f intellect, of science, of military power and might, and many of them move in an orthodox world that is seeking to preach the Cross with a wisdom, a cunning, and a genius that can prove adequate to command the world’s respect. Many of these young people have been converted under a popular, streamlined, high-pressure evangelism, an evangelism with a technique “ powerful enough to rebuild the world.” We fear that with many of
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THE KING'S BUSINESS
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