What Missionary Motives Should Prevail? 89 past-ripe grain, for lack of hands to gather it into the garner, was rotting on the stalk. Then it was—these physical con ditions suggesting the spiritual—that the great heart revealed its longing, and that there came forth the appealing, pathetic cry : “Pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that He will send forth laborers into His harvest.” We would not imply, for a moment, that there was not sufficient cause in the sight of the multitudes that day to thus mightily move the heart of the Son of God. At the same time, we can but think that not a little part of the emotion which Jesus experienced was occasioned by the fact that the multi tudes before Him were a picture of those other, greater mul titudes which went to make up a lost world, and also of those other and still greater multitudes which were yet unborn and which would go to make up the lost world which was yet to be. For Christ ever looked on things with a divinely prophetic eye; and there was everything in that present view to suggest the wider vision. And so the heart bled out its grief; and so the voice plaintively asked the help of man. And thus this same Christ is ever looking down from heaven’s throne, the same heart is ever feeling its weight of compassionate woe, and the same voice is ever pleading with His disciples to see as He sees and to feel as He feels. This then is the second motive which God sets before Christians, namely, to enter into Christ’s compassion for the lost souls and lives of men, and thus to be moved as He was moved, and to be constrained to do as He did. A THIRD MOTIVE The Gospels, recording the earthly life of Jesus, are full of promises—mostly from fhe lips of the Master—concerning a coming which would be for the purpose of establishing a kingdom. The Epistles, representing the testimony of the risen and glorified Christ, continue this theme, and always give the same order, first the coming and then the kingdom.
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