It would be easy to recall the lives of great missionaries and point out how they received their divine guidance through other men—not even through a dream, far less through some miraculous vision, but through a brother man who came to talk with them, reasoned with them, and showed them the best way in which a man could use his life. Men are indispensable to God in order to guide other men into the work which God has for them to do. And one reason why there is such an awful waste of life to-day, why so many men, going out of the colleges, miss the highest work of their lives, is simply because there are not enough other men who recognize that they are indispensable to God in order that, through them, God may guide men to their highest and most efficient places.

Men are indispensable to God in bringing men to Jesus Christ. As men were brought to Christ by other men in the beginning, so has it been during all the succeeding years. The angels are willing to do what they can, but none of us have had any visible object lessons of what they do. Men have been brought to Christ always by other men. Imperfect lives are to be brought up to the Perfect Life, and to do this service Christ uses common men, just such as we are. That is what Paul conceived as the glory of his life, that he had the privilege of being the bond—no other beings in the universe being able to take that place—between men who had not found Christ and Christ hunting for His own.

Then God requires men now as He never required them in all the days gone by to bear testimony to the Deity of Jesus Christ. We know how little value our Lord attached to any accrediting evidences that did not come right out of pure, human personality. He discredited the advantages of bringing back Abraham from the dead, for example, to bear testimony to the truth. If men were not willing to accept adequate moral evidence, valid human testimony, they would not believe by miracle, He said. That is why He was so pleased with the confession of Simon Peter. “Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-jona; for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven.” It rejoiced Him to get such testimony from a man who, in turn, had drawn it out of his own experience of God. There is no greater need in the world to-day than for a great body of men who know Christ to be God more surely than they know themselves to be men, and are able to go out and testify to what Christ can do with a definiteness and certainty greater than that of any other testimony they can bear, who can say what John said, “That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you.” If there ever was a day when God was calling men to a great undertaking, He is calling them now to be His witnesses, unimpeachable, unflinching, to the unique personality, to the supreme divine character and power of our God and Saviour Jesus Christ.

And it is not only for great men that God is calling to do these indispensable tasks for Him. He wants the great men, no doubt, but He wants, more than that, the great mass of the common men. After all, the great man is only one man, and every little man counts just as many as one great man. Since God has to have all, one little man is as indispensable to the all as one great man can be. And until He has all, He cannot do what He purposes to do. It is only when we all come “unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” that any one of us can come. It is only when we “comprehend with all saints, what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height” of the love of Christ, that any one of us can comprehend it. It is only when we all reflect as in a mirror the character of Christ that any one of us shall be “changed ... from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord.” And the little men, as a matter of fact, are doing as much as the great. The night that Gough stood alone, with all hope gone, a drunkard in the gutter, an almost forgotten man laid his hand on his shoulder and said, “Man, there is a better life than this for you.” The name of that man is remembered by a few, but forgotten by the multitudes who will never forget the name of John B. Gough, or cease to feel the glow of the fires which he kindled to blaze until the Judgment Day. Even a little man may fill such an indispensable place as that of helping God lay hold of a great man who will be one of the unmistakable forces of God.

And it is not only every man that is indispensable to God, but also every bit of every man. We cannot take some sections of our lives and eliminate them as though they were not indispensable to God. There can be no schism between a man’s public and his private life. His hands and what he does with them, his imaginings and where they go when he is alone by himself without any coercing, these are just as much indispensable to God as a man’s public worship or any of his activities in the open ministry of Christ’s kingdom. It is every bit of the man—body, soul, and spirit—that is indispensable to God.

And if we are indispensable to God, we may be very sure that we are indispensable to the world also. If God needs us, the world needs us even more. It is waiting for the rising up of men who know that God needs them, and who hand themselves over completely to His uses. “The mightiest of civilizing agencies are persons,” said Dr. Fairbairn, “and the mightiest civilizing persons are Christian men.” Those men are doing most for the world who are doing most to make men aware of how necessary they are to God, and who are going up and down the lands allying men’s lives to the eternal life and power of God. This is the greatest of all works—getting God His men. I heard Dr. J. Campbell Gibson tell the Chamber of Commerce in Glasgow of a visit which he made to a temple which had been turned into a modern school in inland China. Over the gate of the school were these words in Chinese: “If you are planting for ten years, plant trees; if you are planting for a hundred years, plant men.” Men are God’s great interest and want.

What an opportunity this opens for every man of us! We have thought of our lives as little, insignificant, trivial, of no consequence. There is One walking in the midst of us Who was speaking to Ezekiel. “I am hunting for a man,” He is saying, “I am hunting for a man,” and it is open to every one of us to rise up and say, “Lord, I am that man you are hunting for. Seek no further. Here am I. Have me for your man.” Is that the answer that He is getting from us?

LECTURE III
AN UNFRIGHTENED HOPE

If we were asked what we considered to be the supremest motive in life, the motive which does actually exercise the largest control over human conduct, what would our answer be? A generation ago men would have answered glibly enough: “The desire for happiness.” That was then supposed to be the one commanding motive of mankind. But it was not long before the answer seemed unsatisfactory and indefinite, because what brings happiness to one man brings misery to another, or what a man thinks will delight him in the end disappoints and such experiences issue in confusion. It was ethically indiscriminate also. The same motive covered moral contradictions, and men wanted some more consistent answer to the question. Nowadays those who look despondently at life often say in reply: “Avarice,—the desire for wealth.” Or, those who look a little more deeply say it is not money, but the power that money represents that men desire, and that their real motive is to acquire sources of influence and control. Some who look at life more hopefully are likely to reply: “Love or friendship.” That is the thesis of one of the noblest books of our generation, written by the late Dr. Henry Clay Trumbull, entitled “Friendship, the Master Passion.” Doctor Trumbull told me once that when he first began the work on this theme he spoke about it to his friend Charles Dudley Warner, who said: “Trumbull, you cannot prove that thesis.” After the book was done, Doctor Trumbull took the book to him and asked if he would read it. He read it, gave it back, saying: “Well, Trumbull, you have shown that it is true, after all.” And that is a lovely view to take of life: that the motive that lies deeper than any other, and that really in the actual conduct of men and women is the most controlling, is the motive of unselfish friendship, of love.