"WHAT SHALL I DO, LORD?"

“WHAT SHALL I DO, LORD?”

The effect of the revelation of Christ in glory to the heart of Saul of Tarsus was to awaken in him and draw from him the question, “What shall I do, Lord?” When one is truly convinced of the folly and evil of one’s course hitherto, there arises necessarily in the heart and conscience this inquiry: What am I to do? How shall I act? The nature or the measure of the effect of the revelation of Christ to my heart is declared by the earnestness and simplicity in which I seek to know from Him what He would have me to do. When He absolutely fills the heart, conscious of its insubjection heretofore, and seeking now to yield itself altogether to Him, it utters the anxious question, “What wilt thou have me to do?”

Now my doing anything for the Lord depends as to its intent and scope on the measure of my knowledge of what He has done for me. If there be any defect in my reception of the fulness of His work for me, there will be a corresponding and distinct trace of this flaw in my work for Him. Love always has an act expressive of itself, and in, or rather by, this act, it betrays itself in a peculiar way. “We love him, because he first loved us”. His acts demonstrate the nature and quality of His love, and ours, of our love; and the order and quality of our love to Him will be according to the idea we have formed, and the measure in which we have apprehended His love to us. With Saul of Tarsus everything was so assured to him, a Saviour in glory was so distinctly ^[p. 396] revealed to him, that self was set aside, and the Lord’s pleasure entirely and absolutely swayed him. It is plain that if there be any limitation in my heart of what Christ is for me, it must impart a bias to my response to Him. Paul declares that at his conversion it pleased God to reveal His Son in him. When Christ obtains the absolute place in the heart, it has no object but Christ, and therefore it implicitly defers to Him about everything.

It is important to see that the first cause of unspiritual and unapproved real service can be traced to the weakness of the soul’s apprehension of Christ’s service to it. Every true observer must admit that there is a vast amount of zeal without knowledge, resulting in unsuited work, in the present day. Works are entered on because the necessities of the hour seem to suggest or require them, and not in simple obedience to Christ. No one can truly serve the Lord but as he knows the Lord’s pleasure with respect to the service. He must be inwardly and outwardly fitted for it. The Lord does not employ unfitted servants for His work. He prepares them for it, imparts His own grace, so that “by the grace of God I am what I am”.

Thus true service depends on two things; first, on the measure of my heart’s apprehension of Christ for myself, and secondly, on my fitness for the service committed to me, a really subject one. If I am defective in either of these, there will be a defect in every service undertaken, however useful and laborious it may be. Moses had purpose of heart to serve the Lord in Exodus 2; he chose “rather to suffer affliction with the people of God, than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season”. But he had to be fitted for it in this double way; he was not only to lose his self-confidence, but to have his own soul established with God, and to learn what it was to act for God, to come to man from God. The want of this is really the great lack in servants. They are not fully brought to God away and apart from all the influences ^[p. 397] of man, and therefore do not come back to man with only God’s mind and without any other prepossession. If they have never been so near God that every human influence was in abeyance, they could not possibly act independently of it in their intercourse with man. Moses learns to distrust his own power; but better still, he is taught, in the presence of God, the mind of God and His power (Exodus 3); and when he has really entered on God’s service, and because he has, he is exposed to judgment from the Lord for having neglected to circumcise his son; the ministry must not be blamed; Exodus 4: 24. There must be suitability in the servant, and this suitability is twofold; on the one hand it is separation from the order and influence of things here, and on the other, conformity to Christ, which is only acquired in His presence.

In order to serve truly we must be first assured of our acceptance in the glory of God. This is the first thing, because until the soul has reached this point there has never been a locus standi apart from man, and it is from there the servant comes forth to do his Master’s will. Secondly, he must seek his Lord’s mind, and that unmixed and unleavened by anything of man. He is like the admiral at sea, no preconceived ideas of his own as to his course. Until the sealed orders are opened and read, he knows nothing as to the destination of his fleet.

Moses, like many of us, learnt the unprofitableness of himself first, and then he found what it was to be in a new order of things near God, where he could learn His mind; and thus he was fitted to be a servant.

Peter, in Luke 5, is an instance of how the service is always characterised by the soul’s apprehension of Christ. At first he lends his ship to the Lord for teaching the people, when called on to do so, and lets down his net for a draught at the word of Christ; but when, convicted of being a “sinful man”, he learns that Jesus can take away fear from his heart in the presence of ^[p. 398] God, he leaves all and follows Him. There is great advance in the order of service between these two actions. But after the resurrection, in John 21, there is still more. After the Lord had taught him that he must be entirely cast on Him, after He had probed his heart as to the self-confidence which had led to his denying Him, he says to him, “Follow me”, and then foretells the death he should die in the service which should result from following Him. Now the advance in each of these services was in correspondence to the advance in Peter’s knowledge of divine grace. In proportion to the perfection of his knowledge of grace was the perfection of his service as to its character; and we see each of these forms of service up to this hour.

What really gives power to a servant is having a true sense of what it is to be in a sphere where he is independent of every influence but his Master’s. He is by nature connected with a sphere where the influences, even of the air, are against his Lord, therefore to be independent of all influence or support around is his first great lesson in service. Joseph’s first lesson in this school was that his father, who had hitherto countenanced and upheld him, did not understand him, but rebuked him when he told him what God had revealed to him in a dream; Genesis 37: 10. Thus from the first he was cast entirely on God, and then in the pit, in bondage, and in prison he was prepared for service.

We see in the case of Jonah, of Ezekiel, and of Daniel, how necessary and important it is for the servant to have his base, as I may say, with God; and while that is kept up he can never fail. When the heart is assured of this base, then, like Isaiah in chapter 6, when the Lord asks, “Whom shall I send?” it can say, “Send me”. He is not afraid or unwilling to face anything among men, because he knows his base is with God; and being accepted and at rest there, he can come forth and act for God here, happy in the consciousness of his place with God, from whom and for whom he comes. It ^[p. 399] was thus in perfection with our blessed Lord, who, amidst all the opposition and evil of man, could say in rest of heart, “I thank thee, O Father”.

The happy and the really useful servant is the one who pleases his Lord. Unless this is the spring and motive of service there will be failure, and in order to please Him I must study Him. I shall never know what pleases the Lord unless I am constantly near Him, not by resorting to Him in prayer now and again, but rather by abiding in His company long enough to get the impression of it, like Moses on the mount, until I am coloured by His mind. If I do not sit at His feet and hear His word, I shall fall into one or another of the many mistakes as to service rife enough at this hour. I must not only hear His word, I must be in His company. Everything depends on this. There is no real comprehension of the word but in His presence; at least the moral range or claim of it cannot be apprehended anywhere else. If, as I have already endeavoured to show, this moral sense or claim be unknown, even though the purpose be true as with Moses, or the heart ready as with Martha, the service will be ineffectual and unapproved by the Master. Studying the Lord and His mind alone prepares for true and effectual service, and servants of this class refer all to His judgment, content to be unseen and unrecognised, provided that they are pleasing Him. To please the Master is the one satisfaction to their hearts. The two other classes who, while attempting service, lose sight of it in its highest sense, are, firstly, those who seek to carry out a right purpose in a wrong way, using any means for this purpose; and secondly, those who with a really loving heart determine what would please the Lord from their own idea of what is fitting in the circumstances. Moses when he slew the Egyptian is a type of the first, as is Peter when he cut off the ear of the high priest’s servant, and John when he asked the Lord to call down fire from heaven. All these were true men, but were seeking ^[p. 400] to arrive at a right end by unspiritual means. The truest servant may be tempted to resort to means of this kind, like David, who actually tried on Saul’s armour before he had wisdom to refuse it. The secret desire is to produce an effect by visible means, and then faith and the invisible acting of God’s Spirit are superseded and ignored, often most unintentionally. This class of servants, when not checked by the light of God’s word, have not hesitated to use fire and sword, or any engine, to bring about a desired end. They suffer often, too, in a most exemplary way, but they really — and it is with this we have to do — have not truly inquired of the Lord, “What wilt thou have me to do?” nor have they obtained instructions from Him as to the mode and manner of carrying out His mind. To produce a desired effect by any lawful means is the grand principle of this class; and I need hardly say that, though answered according to their faith, they are not “friends” of Christ; they do not know what their Lord doeth.

Now Martha is a type of the second of these last two classes. She really loved the Lord, but she judged as to what would please Him by her own feelings instead of His. Thus she thought that the service which would be most acceptable to Him at the moment would be providing food; and she intrudes this service on Him as superior to that which was really meeting His mind. Hers was a kind, useful work, but she acquired the idea of it from her own mind, and not from the Lord; and here she failed, and here it is that all that I may call officious serving in the present day fails. Nothing perhaps so effectively, because so insidiously, diverts the heart from Christ personally as the service which stands under the head of usefulness. Singing a hymn or reading a chapter in a meeting might come under this head. You never see a person who is occupied with mere usefulness near the Lord. This may seem a hard censure, but the fact is that where the mind is taken up with usefulness, it is taking note of the state of things around — man’s want, the soul’s need, etc., all right if regarded as secondary, but all diverting from the true centre when looked at as primary. To one who makes them primary there is no check. Need being the thing before his mind, there may be as much need in one place as another, and such a one would as soon go to Bithynia as to Philippi; see Acts 16: 7, 12. Thus women with true hearts go out of their place in teaching and preaching, thinking that the word warrants their officiousness; as if pleasing the Lord were not the highest and best service, as it ought to be the one most attractive to the heart. All this line of service is based on the pre-supposition that the Lord’s pleasure is not to be consulted nor known; and in pursuing it the heart is really diverted from Him to something very visibly useful, as in the case of Ephesus in Revelation 2, where there was great zeal for the circumstantial need and plenty of good works, but the first love had vanished from the heart.

Thus on the one hand we have to guard against seeking to accomplish right things by unspiritual means, and on the other, not to allow our own minds, or even man’s need merely, to dictate to us what we are to do, because in either case we have declined from that nearness to the Lord, where His pleasure would have been communicated to us, and where His power would have supported us in keeping with His mind, and preserved us from the use of undue means and from being influenced by visible things. Finally, I would repeat that the only way for a servant to avoid these two snares, or indeed to enter on service which is pleasing to the Lord, is first, that the heart should be assured of its base with God, and secondly, that the great question, “What shall I do, Lord?” should be resolved by the study of the Master’s mind in His presence and apart from all human influences.