Personal Po^er in Service Is Our Failure in Christ’s Work Due to the Wrong Book or the Wrong Man? Am I Gehazi? , By the Late DR. JOSEPH PARKER • London,
Eng. faithfulness may be the beginning of success. Gehazi came back and said, in effect, “ Here is the staff, but it has done no good. There is neither sight, nor hearing nor sound of returning voice; the child is not awaked.’?. There is the staff, unbroken, uninjured— the prophet’s staff. Let him take it back again, and remember that the child is not awaked. Why was that staff use less? A prophet’s staff—yet no* doing a prophet’s work. Does the prophet’s staff require a prophet’s hand to use it? There may be something in that suggestion. It is not every man who can wear the armour of Saul; it may not be every man who can use the staff of Elisha. Let us, therefore, go into critical inquiry of a moral kind. Who was this Gehazi? An undeve loped hypocrite. Up to this moment he may have secured outwardly his mas ter’s confidence and regard, but wo are more than one self. There were three or fpur different men in that Gehazi figure. There are three or four differ ent men in each of us. Which man is it to whom we speak; who is it that announces the hymn, that offers the prayer, that reads the Scriptures, that proclaims the Word? “ Things are not what they seem.” Gehazi was at this moment an undeveloped knave; and what can he do with Elisha’s staff, or with God’s sunlight? The man with sin in his life spoils whatever . he touches. The staff is good, the hand that wielded it was bad: there was no true sympathy or connection between the hand and the staff: it was only in the hand, it was not in the heart. There was a merely physical grasp, there was CHRISTMAS GIFT SUGGESTIONS
“And Gtshazi passed on before them, and laid the staff upon the face of the child, but . . 2 K ings 4:31. H ERE is a remarkable thing in Bible history—nothing less than ' that a miracle should miscarry. Here is an attempt to work a miracle, which ends in failure. This is strange and most pain ful. Who knows what may fail next? The reading about miracles in the Bible is such easy reading, everything goes on so fluently and happily, that one is call ed up with great abruptness at an in stance like the present. Is it without a parallel? Does it stand wholly alone? Are there any purposed miracles sud denly broken in failure? Does the staff ever come back without having done its work? We are bound to ask these sharp and serious questions. Do not let us hasten perfunctorily over the melancholy fact of our failure'; let us face it and wisely consider it, and find put whether the blame be in Elisha, or Gehazi, or the staff, or whether God Himself may be working out some mystery of wisdom in occasionally re buking us in the use of means and in struments. Elisha was not a man like ly to make vain experiments. He sure ly would not send a staff that would fail if he knew it. Surely this was not the first time the staff had been sent upon such an errand. Was Elisha an adventurer, an empiric, a man who wanted to do with a staff what can only be done by a life? We must insist upon putting these piercing inquiries because to heal the hurt slightly is but to post pone, the pain. We had, therefore, bet ter know with all frankness and sim plicity exactly what the case is, for in
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