The plan of keeping a separate "Lord's Treasury" is recommended for those who cannot attend the services of the Church.
Free-will or thank-offerings.
This method is a safety valve for those whose income is growing and who can easily afford to give large sums in addition to their regular offerings. God expects cash and consecration, gold and goodness, riches and righteousness to increase together.
"Give, give, be always giving,
Who gives not is not living,
The more you give
The more you live,
Give strength, give thought, give deeds, give self,
Give love, give tears and give thyself,
Give, give, be always giving.
Who gives not is not living.
The more you give, the more you live."
The propagation of the principles and methods of stewardship is an important part of the program of every individual Christian and of the Church Missionary Committee. Thorough agitation on the subject should always precede the annual every-member canvass. Many churches have received unprecedented spiritual blessings because of the adoption and practise of higher standards of giving. Finally, it should not be forgotten that the missionary appeal is one of the most powerful motives to stewardship. The appeal for the two should go together.
III. Unending Prayer
The sovereign summons to men is the summons to prayer. It is a call to use the great unused human resource of power. It is a call to every man to walk with the tread of a giant "an open but unfrequented path to immortality." Other lesser calls must die out in us if the present spiritual world crisis is to be met. Practical men of business say that this is the work of the minister or the missionary, but Christ's call to prayer was not limited to any group of individuals or to a special section of the Church. The men of our time are discovering that they have a wealth of talent of which they did not dream,—to bring things to pass by prayer. Intercession has ever been what Arthur Smith calls "The deeply buried talent."
Let us in the beginning frankly face the fact that there is no call which involves more of unwithholding consecration than the life of intercession. There is no service which demands so much of a man, which digs down so deep into his life, which floods with such a searching light all the methods and principles by which men govern their lives.
On the other hand let it not be forgotten that there is no human means of releasing such measureless forces among mankind. We are in the midst of a spiritual conflict, and prayer is the determining factor in that conflict. This involves not simply a prayer for ourselves in a few hurried sentences at night, when too tired to remember what has been prayed for when the words are said, not a few fragments of time given to this most important occupation, but prayer, central in life, having a clear space in which to live and breathe and yet not confined to times and seasons but mingling with the whole of life. Sadly it must be confessed that intercession is not yet the passion of our lives.
Prayer gives quiet confidence that things really happen when men pray. It is as vital as muscular force, as real as electricity. It wrenches men loose from their limitations and projects personality into distant lands. It is the lever of God to pry continents and dead civilizations up into newness of life. It is the power which helps to lift history out of its bed and puts it down into new channels where it belongs. It is of this force which John R. Mott speaks when he says: "The supreme question of missions is how to multiply the number of Christians who, with truthful lives and with clear unshaken faith in the character and ability of God, will, individually or collectively, or coöperatively as a church, wield the force of intercessory prayer for the conversion and transformation of men, for the inauguration and energizing of spiritual movements, and for the breaking down of all that exalts itself against Christ and his purposes."