THE LEAF INDICATES THE ROOT
THE LEAF INDICATES THE ROOT
You must not measure my interest by my slowness in replying to your letter. I have been almost each day on the move.
I was showing one morning at ———— how patient dependence on God indicates the quality for promotion (as I might say) in service. Joseph in prison, for example. This applies very much to young people in the daily round of home duties. There is nothing very salient or exciting, but the one beaten course, though no day is exactly like any preceding day, and no past experience will help in the present. It is your state at the moment which determines your capacity for action; that is, when you are called to act you will always discover what your state is, whether you are with the Lord or have lost the sense of His presence. When Moses’ hands were up, Joshua prevailed. I think we should often be too self-satisfied were we not made conscious of our dereliction by our failures in action. The great good of daily duties is that they expose our frailty. It is not so much that we are always incompetent, but that at times we are found unequal for the demand upon us, even where we might have excelled at a former time, and this is allowed in order to show us that we have lost ground within, and the act without has betrayed the true state. I believe the manner of the act always indicates the state within, as the leaf indicates the state of a tree. The leaves tell how the roots [p. 243] are. It is the force of vitality that constitutes the evergreen. So is it with the soul that lives on Christ. “His leaf also shall not wither; and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper” (Psalm 1: 3). “If thou hast run with the footmen, and they have wearied thee, then how canst thou contend with horses?” (Jeremiah 12: 5). If you do not keep green in the shade, what would you be in the great desert....
I like to count up each year those whom the Lord consigns in any special way to my care, and I trust I may say this has been a good year. It is curious how some take so many seasons before I get real interest in them or feel charged in a special manner with them.
It cheered me to see you so eagerly entering into the truth I was seeking to present. The more one knows of the separate place in which the truth sets one, the more is one able to comprehend the truth. The difficulty of understanding arises more from the incongruities with which we are associated than from the truth itself. If one were always in the separation in which Christ is, which is ‘exclusiveness’, in its true sense, there would not be more difficulty in understanding the truth than in understanding the commonest things, for then the truth would be with us the commonest thing — the thing we most live in, and everything outside of it would be incongruous and incomprehensible.