of Him who, when He was most wearied, sitting on the well, was so invigorated and refreshed by the opportunity of winning another soul that, when His disciples came back to Him, they looked at His fresh strength with astonishment, and said to themselves, ’Has any man brought Him anything to eat?’ Ay, what He had to eat was work that He finished for the Father, and some of us know that the truest refreshment in toil is a change of toil.  It is almost as good to shift the load on to the other shoulder, or to take a stick into the other hand, as it is to put away the load altogether.  Oh, the careful limits which Christian people nowadays set to their work for Jesus!  They are not afraid of being tired in their pursuit of business or pleasure, but in regard to Christ’s work they will let anything go to wrack and ruin rather than that they should turn a hair, by persevering efforts to prevent it.  Work to the limit of power if you live in the light of blessedness.

She ‘laboured much in the Lord,’ or, as Jesus Christ said about the other woman who was blamed by the people that did not love enough to understand the blessedness of self-sacrifice, ’she had done what she could.’  It was an apology for the form of Mary’s service, but it was a stringent demand as to its amount.  ’What she could’—­not half of what she could; not what she conveniently could.  That is the measure of acceptable service.

Then, still further, may we not learn from Persis the spring of all true Christian work?  She ‘laboured much in the Lord,’ because she was ‘in Him,’ and in union with Him there came to her power and desire to do things which, without that close fellowship, she neither would have desired nor been able to do.  It is vain to try to whip up Christian people to forms of service by appealing to lower motives.  There is only one motive that will last, and bring out from us all that is in us to do, and that is the appeal to our sense of union and communion with Jesus Christ, and the exhortation to live in Him, and then we shall work in Him.  If you link the spindles in your mill, or the looms in your weaving-shed, with the engine, they will go.  It is of no use to try to turn them by hand.  You will only spoil the machinery, and it will be poor work that you will get off them.

So, dear brethren, be ‘in the Lord.’  That is the secret of service, and the closer we come to Him, and the more continuously, moment by moment, we realise our individual dependence upon Him, and our union with Him, the more will our lives effloresce and blossom into all manner of excellence and joyful service, and nothing else that Christian people are whipped up to do, from lower and more vulgar motives than that, will.  It may be of a certain kind of inferior value, but it is far beneath the highest beauty of Christian service, nor will its issues reach the loftiest point of usefulness to which even our poor service may attain.