to move among
men after the resurrection, and while they would feel the gentle
winsomeness of His presence and talk, they did not recognize Him. Has
somebody run across you or me sometime, and been with us a little while,
and then gone away saying to himself, "I wonder if that was Jesus back
again in disguise. He seemed so much like what I think Jesus must have
been--I wonder."
Well, if it were so, of course we would not be conscious of it. A
Jesus-man is never absorbed in thinking about himself. He is taken up with
Jesus, and with folks. A man is always least conscious of the power of his
own presence and life. Everybody else knows more about it than he does.
Plainly this is the Master's plan for each of us. And more, it is the
result when He is allowed free sway.
The controlling principle of His life was to please His Father. The
pervading purpose and passion was to win men out and up. The
characteristics of His life were purity, unselfishness, sympathy, and
simplicity. We are to be as He. He was the Father to all the race of men.
Each of us is to be Jesus to his circle.
Please notice I'm not talking about lips just now but about lives. The
life is the indorsement of the lips. It makes the words of the lips more
than they sound or seem. Or, it makes them less, sometimes pitiably less,
little more than a discount clerk ever busily at work. The words ever go
to the level of the life, up or down. Water seeks its level persistently.
So do one's words, and they find it more quickly than the water, for they
go _through_ all obstructions. And the life is the leveler of the words,
up or down.
So far as this second life is concerned a man's lips might be sealed, and
his tongue dumb, but his life in its purity and simplicity, its
unselfishness and sympathetic warmness will ever be spelling out Jesus.
And He will be spelled out so big and plain that the man hurriedly
running, or lazily creeping, or half blind in a cloud of dust, will be
stopping and reading. If there were but more re-incarnations of Jesus how
folks would be coming a-running to Him.
Do you remember that prayer in blank verse of the old Scottish preacher
and poet and saint, Horatius Bonar? He said:
"Oh, turn me, mould me, mellow me for use.
Pervade my being with Thy vital force,
That this else inexpressive life of mine
May become eloquent and full of power,
Impregnated with life and strength divine.
Put the bright torch of h
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