SERVING the Lord in order to be happier in Him tends to legality. The work done is the source of the happiness and not Christ Himself. In John 14.; I learn what Christ is to me, and there is no service enjoined beyond obedience, which is the proof of love. If I love, I obey. Mary Magdalene is an example to me of one whose heart was so true to Christ that apostles or angels could not divert her from Him; but as soon as she has seen Him, her heart is satisfied. His calling her by name is everything, a personal, individual link. What can surpass it? She is so controlled by Him of whom her heart is full, that she obeys Him even at the loss of His bodily presence, because a truly loving one could do nothing less. I believe that deep, personal joy in Christ is a very quiet, unexpressed thing. Where there is great fervour in expression there is not likely to be so much depth, though there may be real conviction. Demonstration expresses first discovery rather than a home sense of personal enjoyment. How much demonstration and rapture do we exhibit to our most beloved friends when we are at home with one another? When we meet them after an absence, there may be rapture, but this is an evidence that there has been absence. Alas ! we are often absent from our Lord; and the renewed sense of His presence may doubtless produce rapture in its contrast with what has gone before; but it is the lower thing, and the restful enjoyment of His personal nearness is the greater thing. Let us therefore not make everything of rapture, but rise from it to the deeper occupation of abiding communion with Him. It is from this communion that the service ought to flow; for communion with any one is in fact a common mind with such a one; and if I have it with God, I know my Master's mind. It is not the hardest working servant who is the most confidential in the household, and it is the confidential servant who is the highest. I am willing to keep the door, if no other work be allotted to me; but I should like so to keep it that my Master should trust me with His mind.
The saint is never to think himself proof against the evil in the world. No doubt by faith he is kept from the evil; but then he must not shut his eyes to the special form it takes in his day, if he would be free from it. The reverse is the fact. Any evil working in the world finds its way into the hearts of saints in a refined, specious way. Now sensationalism is one of the means by which Satan is blinding the minds of the people of the world in this day. Be it the novel, the concert, or the stage, a sort of mental intoxication is sought and produced. And may not this in a specious form enter into spiritual things? Was there none of it in the revival meetings? Is there not a leaven of it now? And should not souls see that their rapture and delight is not that in which the flesh takes part, but on the contrary, that which ignores the existence of the flesh, because they are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit?
