WHAT IS YOUR MISSION?

WHAT IS YOUR MISSION?

Why are you set where you are, and why has the Lord told you so much of His mind? Wherefore and for what reason? He has made nothing in vain. The sand on the sea shore is there by His ordering, and it fulfils His decree - Do you? Why has He called you out, and having done so, why has He fixed your habitation at ——, and for what purpose? Is a star set in the firmament to be only a creation there, and has it no mission? Have you no mission which you could not have executed without the grace of God? You might have been a most dutiful child, a most loving sister, without grace. The young ruler (Mark 10) kept all the commandments referring simply to man, and the Lord loved him, but he had not the grace in his soul to prefer Christ to everything on earth. Now did grace, when he received it, confer no higher mission on him ^[p. 127] than the one he had fulfilled so well before he received it? What I want you to ask yourself is, Why the Lord, having brought you to Himself, appoints you to be where you are? And what does He expect you to do now more than a good unconverted girl would have done?

Are you a member of Christ in the very scene and premises from which He has been expelled, without any mission or calling entirely distinct and superior to anything which one in nature could discharge? If a tuber were brought from the tropics, and after much care in planting, it had grown up and was found to be only a potato, what would every one say? Would it not be said, ‘We have plenty of that vegetable here already, there was no need to go so far and expend so much time and trouble in rearing a plant which already we can bring to quite as great perfection in this country without incurring so much expense and toil?’ Can it be said of you by the angels that you would have been quite as good a daughter or a sister without grace? and that they do not see on you the coat of many colours, the manifold wisdom of God - that is, that the heavenly colours of divine light do not supersede the dingy hue of natural amiability?

I really could not tell you what you ought to do, but I know that a star shines, and I know an exotic is quite different from the indigenous plants of the country, and that if it is not, the owner is greatly disappointed. I believe you have a very serious and responsible position. You are the only one in the sphere in which you move, to whom the Lord has shewn His mind, and what is the path for Him here. Surely if there were a firmament in which there was but one star, that one star would be under a great responsibility to the Creator to fulfil its mission in the sphere which it was appointed to enlighten.