The meetings and tracts are only good but they ought to be on the train to Nineveh, and in Nineveh where God’s sent you.  Are you berthed on the boat for Tarshish? or have you a seat engaged on the train for Nineveh? going your own way? or God’s?  John was sent and he came.  You and I are sent.  Are we coming or going? coming God’s way? or, going our own?

Living Martyrs.

This true-hearted burning man of the deserts came for a witness.  Here we strike one of John’s great words.  You remember the three things that witness means? that you know something; that you tell what you know; and that you tell it most with your life.  And telling it with your life means, not only by the way you live, but, too, even though the telling of it may cost you your life.  It came to mean all of that with this witness.

It came to mean that with a new fullness of meaning, a peculiar significance, to the great Witness, of whom John told.  This was the very throbbing heart of the wooing errand.  This explains the tenderness and tenacity of the Lover in His wooing in the midst of intensest opposition, and in spite of it.

The opposition brought about the terrific grouping of circumstances which the great Lover-witness used as the tremendous climax of both wooing and witnessing.  No one doubts the reality of Jesus’ witness to the Father’s love before men.  And no one, who has had any touch at all with Him, doubts the tremendous pull upon one’s heart of such a wooing appeal as that Calvary climax of witnessing made, and makes.

And this, mark it keenly, is still the plan.  “The-same-came-for-witness” is meant to be true of each follower of the Christ.  This is to be the dominant underchording of all our lives.  This is to be the never-absent motive gripping us, and our possessions and our plans.  The rest is incidental in a true life.

It may be a “rest” that takes most of the waking hours with most of us, most of our strength and thought.  But there’s an undercurrent in every life.  And the undercurrent is the controlling current.  It makes us what we really are.  It may be quite different from the upper current controlled by the outer necessities of circumstances.  And with the true Jesus-man this is the undercurrent, this thing of witnessing.

Do you know something of Jesus?  Do you know the cleansing of His blood?  Do you know the music of His peace in your heart?  Do you know a bit of the subtle fragrance of His presence?  Do you know the power of His Name when temptations come, when the road gets slippery, and your feet go out from under you—­almost.  Then His Name, its power, and you hold steady.  Do you know something about such things?

Then tell it.  This is the plan—­telling.  It’s a Gospel of telling.  Tell it with your lips tactfully, gently, boldly, earnestly.  But tell it far more, and most with your life.  Let what you are, when you’re not thinking about this sort of thing, let that tell it.  That’s the greatest telling, the best.