I went to the guide-book and maps to find out something about this river that kept on its way undefiled by its neighbor for so long.  Its source is in a glacier that is between ten thousand and eleven thousand feet high, descending “from the gates of eternal night, at the foot of the pillar of the sun.”  It is fed continually by the melting glacier which, in turn, is being kept up by the snows and cold.  Rising at this great height, ever being renewed steadily by the glacier, it comes rushing down the swift descent of the Swiss Alps through the lake of Geneva and on.  There is the secret of purity, side by side with its dirty neighbor.

Our lives must have their source high up in the mountains of God, fed by a ceaseless supply.  Only so can there be the purity, and the momentum that shall keep us pure, and keep us moving down in contact with men of the earth.  And we must keep closer to the source than is the Rhone at Geneva, else the streams flowing alongside will unduly influence us.  Constant personal contact with Jesus is the beginning ever new of service.

The Triple Life:  The Perspective of Service.

    On An Errand for Jesus. 
    The Parting Message. 
    A Secret Life of Prayer. 
    An Open Life of Purity. 
    An Active Life of Service. 
    The Perspective of True Service. 
    A Long Time Coming.

The Triple Life:  The Perspective of Service.

(Luke ix:1-6; x:1-3, 17; John xx:19-23; Matthew xxviii:18-20.)

On An Errand for Jesus.

You remember there were four times that Jesus picked out a group of men, and sent them on a special errand.  About the middle of the second year of His public life, He chose out twelve men and commissioned them for a special bit of work.  Six months before the tragic end, He chose seventy others and sent them out in twos into all the places He was planning to visit Himself.  It was a remarkable campaign for carrying the news which He was preaching into all the villages of that whole country through which His journey south lay.

Then the evening of that never-to-be-forgotten resurrection day, under wholly changed conditions, He again commissions ten men of that first twelve.  Things had radically changed with Jesus.  And there had been a bad break in the loyalty of these men.  Two of their number are absent.  Judas has gone to his own place, and Thomas was not there that evening.  His absence cost him a week of doubting and mental distress.  Ten of the old inner circle are commissioned anew.  And then do you remember the last time they were together?  It was about six weeks later, on the rounded top of the old Olives Mount, the eleven men with the Master.  Four times He commissioned a group of men for some service He wanted done.