Parables of the Christ-life

by I. Lilias Trotter

And the Christ-life in us, developed and set free, will go by its very nature reaching out and spending itself wherever there is want, in love and longing for the bare places and the far-off. The Spirit will carry our hearts and sympathies and prayers away and beyond the tiny circle around us, of our personal interests and our own work, into fellowship with the Father about the world He loves--fellowship with the Son over the Church for which He gave Himself: "not seeking our own profit, but the profit of many, that they may be saved." Perhaps He will carry us away our very selves, to some waste corner!

"He that soweth sparingly shall reap also sparingly; and he that soweth bountifully shall reap also bountifully. Let each man do according as he had purposed in his heart; not grudgingly, or of necessity, for God loveth a cheerful giver. And God is able to make all grace abound unto you; that ye, having always all sufficiency in everything, may abound unto every good work: as it is written, He hath scattered abroad, He hath given to the poor; His righteousness abideth for ever. And He that supplieth seed to the sower and bread for food, shall supply and multiply your seed for sowing, and increase the fruits of your righteousness: ye being enriched in everything unto all liberality, which worketh through us thanksgiving to God" (R.V.).

And as part of the enriching in everything unto all liberality, God can give us all the ingenuity of love in scattering broadcast Spirit-filled, Spirit-sent seed that He has figured in the seed-vessels--the heaven-given inspiration as to how to lay out His treasures to their uttermost--how to secure to Him the highest return out of our lives, as they do.

Yes, the "return" is to Him, as again we see in parable with the plants. They show us a love that seeketh not her own: no one knows whence the seeds come when they reach their journey's end: no glory can possibly gather round the plants that surrendered their lives to form and shed them. They just give and give, with no aim but to be bare footstalks when all is done. Everything is loosened and spent without a shade of calculation or self-interest.

"Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us, but unto Thy name give glory," they are all saying in spirit: they teach us absolute indifference as to whether our service is appreciated or even recognised, so long as the work is done and the Lord is glorified. The plant itself asks for nothing to keep, nothing to show, nothing to glory in from its whole life toil.

Nothing to glory in--God cannot get His whole glory while man gets any. That seems a truism, but do we realise the fact? "Herein is My Father glorified, that ye bear much fruit." If that is our one aim, as it was in the soul of Jesus, it is bound to be realised. Let Him work this in us too--this simple, absolute, absorbing passion of His years on earth.

And then we shall have, as He had, that independence of visible results that we have just seen in the plants. He left the world--this one world out of His mighty universe in which God had come to dwell--with no more to be seen from His travail than a few hundred brethren, every one of whom had forsaken Him only six weeks before, and of whom but a hundred and twenty had enough purpose of heart to follow on to Pentecost. And still He could say, "Yet surely My judgment is with the Lord, and My work with My God." And though Israel was "not gathered," He was "glorious in the eyes of the Lord" and "made His salvation to the ends of the earth." For it was life that had been sown.

So no matter, if we never see the full up-springing on earth of the Spirit-seed scattered. It is all the more likely that God may trust us with a great multiplying if our faith does not need to witness it. He can grant us spiritual harvests out of sight, of which He only gains the glory. In "the things which Christ hath ... wrought by us ... by the power of the Spirit of God" there is a multiplying energy that can reach, not single souls only, but other souls through them: a Holy Ghost touch that can fire trains, so to speak, far reaching beyond the sphere of what we see or know.

Such is the power of multiplication in the earthly seeds that it needs a constant battle, and the survival of the fittest, to keep us from being overrun with one and another. The henbane, for instance (by no means the most prolific) would, they say, if every seed had its way every year for five years, produce from a single plant ten thousand billions--enough to cover the whole area of the dry land of the world, allowing seventy-three plants to the square metre.[^[2]] Perhaps God permits the seeming waste of such an overwhelming proportion of the seed formed, to show us the Fountain of Life that there is in Him; and to teach us that there is no straitening in the Spirit of the Lord. "There is no limit" (as someone has said) "to what God can do with a man, provided he will not touch the glory."

And God's possibilities for these germs of Spirit-life are not bound by time. Jesus is drawing so near that already our thoughts and hopes begin to step over the shrinking foreground of "the present age," and to rest in the ever-opening horizon beyond. Who can tell what harvest after harvest may be waiting in the eternal years, after the summer of earth has faded into the far past?