What is God's definition of that golden word "success"? He looks at Roman Catholic Europe, and Roman and heathen South America, and Mohammedan and heathen Africa and Asia, and many a forgotten place in many a great land. And then He looks at us, and I wonder what He thinks. Ragland, Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, after years of brain-burying waste, wrote that He was teaching him that "of all plans for securing success the most certain is Christ's own, becoming a corn of wheat, falling into the ground and dying." If coming abroad means that for anyone, is it too much to ask? It was what our dear Lord did.
This brings us to another plea. I find it in the verse that carves out with two strokes the whole result of two lives. "If any man's work abide. . . . If any man's work shall be burned." The net result of one man's work is gold, silver, precious stones; the net result of another man's work is wood, hay, stubble. Which is worth the spending of a life?
An earnest worker in her special line of work is looking back at it from the place where things show truest, and she says, "God help us all! What is the good done by any such work as mine? 'If any man build upon this foundation . . . wood, hay, stubble. . . . If any man's work shall be burned he shall suffer loss; but he himself shall be saved, yet so as by fire!' An infinitude of pains and labour, and all to disappear like the stubble and the hay."
Success—what is it worth?
"I was flushed with praise,
But pausing just a moment to draw breath,
I could not choose but murmur to myself,
'Is this all? All that's done? and all that's gained?
If this, then, be success, 'tis dismaller
Than any failure.'"
So transparent a thing is the glamour of success to clear-seeing poet-eyes, and should it dazzle the Christian to whom nothing is of any worth but the thing that endures? Should arguments based upon comparisons between the apparent success of work at home as distinguished from work abroad influence us in any way? Is it not very solemn, this calm, clear setting forth of a truth which touches each of us? "Every man's work shall be made manifest, for the Day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire, and the fire shall try every man's work of what sort it is." And as we realise the perishableness of all work, however apparently successful, except the one work done in the one way God means, oh, does it not stir us up to seek with an intensity of purpose which will not be denied, to find out what that one work is? The same thought comes out in the verse which tells us that the very things we are to do are prepared before, and we are "created in Christ Jesus" to do them. If this is so, then will the doing of anything else seem worth while, when we look back and see life as God sees it?
It may be that the things prepared are lying close at our hand at home, but it may be they are abroad. If they are at home there will be settled peace in the doing of them there; but if they are abroad, and we will not come and do them?—Oh, then our very prayers will fall as fall the withered leaves, when the wind that stirred them falls, yea more so, for the withered leaves have a work to do, but the prayers which are stirred up by some passing breeze of emotion do nothing, nothing for eternity. God will not hear our prayers for the heathen if He means us to be out among them instead of at home praying for them, or if He means us to give up some son or daughter, and we prefer to pray.
Lord save us from hypocrisy and sham! "Shrivel the falsehood" from us if we say we love Thee but obey Thee not! Are we staying at home, and praying for missions when Thou hast said to us "Go"? Are we holding back something of which Thou hast said, "Loose it, and let it go"? Lord, are we utterly through and through true? Lord God of truthfulness, save us from sham! Make us perfectly true!
I turn to you, brothers and sisters at home! Do you know that if God is calling you, and you refuse to obey you will hardly know how to bear what will happen afterwards? Sooner or later you will know, yea burn through every part of your being, with the knowledge that you disobeyed, and lost your chance, lost it for ever. For that is the awful part. It is rarely given to one to go back and pick up the chance he knowingly dropped. The express of one's life has shot past the points, and one cannot go back; the lines diverge.
"Some of us almost shudder now to think how nearly we stayed at home," a missionary writes. "Do not, I beseech you, let this great matter drift. Do not walk in uncertainty. Do not be turned aside. You will be eternally the poorer if you do."