EXTRACT – SERVICE AND SUFFERING

One would like to encourage the young people who have been brought to the Lord and who have a desire to serve Him, by saying that the Lord will not send you out without your having experienced what is in your own heart, as well as knowing the One whom you would serve … Peter was being prepared for service (Luke 5:1-11), but the Lord would not take him up apart from a real knowledge of himself, yea, not until he had learned his own heart, otherwise he could not rightly serve the Lord. How needful it is to learn our own hearts in this way, in order to serve. The Lord desires to make use of every one of us, but he would have us learn that we are sinful. So immediately Peter comes to the consciousness of his own sinfulness and confesses it, the Lord says to him, “Fear not, henceforth thou shalt be catching men”. In like manner, the Lord has a special call and a special way of educating each one called to His service.

The scripture at the end of John’s gospel (John 21:18-22) gives the public restoration of Peter. He had passed through a good deal of bitter experience, in which he had learned more of the deceitfulness and sinfulness of his own heart, in that he failed very grievously even to the extent of denying the Lord. But the Lord comes in and fully restores him, and thus gives a fresh touch of His love to Peter’s heart. He then indicates to him a fresh sphere of service – shepherding the sheep, feeding the lambs. But the Lord also brings in another thing, and that is the path of suffering. I do not know if we are all prepared to accept this … It is a path that has been marked out for us by the Lord Himself … It is not a path of our own choosing, but one into which we are divinely called. The Lord indicates it to Peter when he says “… when thou shalt be old, thou shalt stretch forth thy hands, and another shall gird thee, and bring thee where thou dost not desire. But he said this signifying by what death he should glorify God”.

There is to be glory to God in the path of suffering into which we are called. John’s gospel is full of it, and one would like to have the power now in one’s soul, and also to see that what we have been called into at the very beginning of our soul’s history is what we shall be proved and tested in, up to the very end. The Lord’s work will stand in the most severe kind of testing. Peter goes through the fire, and many of the saints have passed through the fire of suffering also, but it only brings out what is truly of God in us, and so what will glorify God. Look how much is said of the glory of God in John’s gospel. A man is born blind (John 9:2,3) … it was for the glory of God. Lazarus was allowed to die, but it was to work out for the glory of God ...

One delights in the thought of being found, in any measure, for the glory of God. We can thank Him when the saints are conscious of the peculiar place that this calling has set us in – the place of testimony here, as sustaining that which is to glorify God. Are we all prepared to take it up? … Peter was a failing man, and the Lord seems to use most of his history for our instruction. It says “Peter, turning round, sees the disciple whom Jesus loved following, who also leaned at supper on his breast … Peter, seeing him, says to Jesus, Lord, and what of this man?” Why did Peter thus enquire concerning John, who had that peculiar place of nearness in the bosom of Jesus, and whose feet are now following Jesus? Later, his lips bore the sweetest testimony to the blessedness and greatness of Jesus. Whose lips, or whose pen even, unfolded such glories of the Son of God as did John’s? So the Lord answers Peter, “If I will that he abides until I come, what is that to thee? Follow thou me.” The Lord would thus encourage us to become followers of Himself as answering to His call … Peter and John, together in service … are seen as individually following the Lord.

It is of great encouragement to us to know that the Lord has called us to serve and to suffer, as seen in Peter, also to know that He would bring us into the light of the glory of His Person as seen in John, whose ministry is to abide until the Lord come, remembering that if there is suffering there is also glory to God secured through it. May the Lord encourage us all to take this path.

F. Murchie, from Notes of Readings in New York

and Other Ministry 1934

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