Parables of the Christ-life

by I. Lilias Trotter

Yes, we have to do with One Who "inhabiteth" eternity and works in its infinite leisure. Some years ago, when a new railway cutting was made in East Norfolk, you could trace it through the next summer, winding like a blood-red river through the green fields. Poppy seeds that must have lain buried for generations had suddenly been upturned and had germinated by the thousand. The same thing happened a while back in the Canadian woods. A fir-forest was cut down, and the next spring the ground was covered with seedling oaks, though not an oak-tree was in sight. Unnumbered years before there must have been a struggle between the two trees, in which the firs gained the day, but the acorns had kept safe their latent spark of life underground, and it broke out at the first chance.

And if we refuse to stay our faith upon results that we can see and measure, and fasten it on God, He may be able to keep wonderful surprises wrapt away in what looks now only waste and loss. What an up-springing there will be when heavenly light and air come to the world at last, in the setting up of Christ's kingdom! The waste places may see "a nation born in a day."

All that matters is that our part should be done. We are responsible for sowing to the Spirit--responsible, with an awful responsibility, that power should be set free in our lives, power that shall prevail with God and with men--responsible like the seed-vessel, for fulfilling our ministry to the last and uttermost. Let the cry be on our hearts, as it was on the heart of Jesus, to "finish the work" that the Father has given us. "My meat is to do the will of Him that sent Me, and to finish His work." On He went with it, though it cost Him the strong crying and tears of Gethsemane to fight through to the end--to live on to the "It is finished" of Calvary.

Is it our souls' hunger and thirst that, before He comes, we may have given every message He had for us to deliver--prevailed in every intercession to which He summoned us--"distributed" for His kingdom and "the necessity of saints" every shilling He wanted--shared with Him every call to "the fellowship of His sufferings" for others--pouted out His love and sympathy and help as He poured them out on earth? Are we longing that He should find when He comes no unspent treasure, no talent laid up in a napkin, like the unshed seed in its shelly fold? Are we acting as if it were our longing? "By Him actions" (not longings) "are weighed!"

Take one more look at our meadow. The summer days are cooling down, and the storms have begun to come. The ground is bare and blackened, the stalks and leaves are battered to shreds: but seeds are everywhere. The earth is strewn with the husks. Whence they come none can tell, and they are broken down into nothingness. All is death--death reigning. The first showers are only bringing in a fresh stage of it where all seemed dead before, beating them, bleached and weather-worn and split, into the softened mould. Everything is quiet, for the seeds have gone down into the resting stage through which they all have to pass, whether it is during the frost in England, or the burning African summer. Do we not know the counterpart in the inner world, when Spirit-seed has been shed, and a strange waiting-time comes in which nothing happens--a silence on God's part in which death has to be allowed to reign before it is swallowed up in victory?

But all is on the very verge of a flood-tide of life, for the seed-vessel has reached its highest ministry now. The last wrappings are torn, and from every rent and breach the bare grain is shed forth and brought into direct contact with the soil: and suddenly, as if by miracle, the quickening comes, and the emerald shoot is to be seen.

Can we read our last lesson? Here, in service, we see the same goal being reached as in the soul's inner history. Both end in absolute simplicity, in Christ alone. For the highest aim of ministry is to bring His immediate presence into contact with others--so to bring Him and them face to face that He can act on them directly, while we stand aside, like John the Baptist, rejoicing greatly.

We used to look at our inner life as separate from our service: but as we go on they merge into one--Christ--the same Christ; whether folded to our hearts in His secret temple, like the seed in its husk, or set free in contact with those around to carry on His quickening work--all and only Christ.

"Christ the beginning, and the end is Christ." We saw how the soul's first step is to let Him in as its life: the last step in a sense can go no further. It is only that the apprehension of Him has increased, and the hindrances and limitings have been swept away.