Chapter I: The Evangelist

With regard to the evangelist himself, one truth stands out clearly from the whole narrative, his work is _given_ to him to do. He is first and foremost a missionary, one sent.

It is a pity, perhaps, that in our ordinary speech, we have come to limit the name "missionary" so much to the man who carries the gospel abroad. No doubt he is a missionary in the highest sense of the word; but still the fundamental idea in every minister or evangelist's position is the idea of one sent--sent for a particular purpose, with a particular message to proclaim wherever God may place him. He has no power, no authority of his own. All that he has comes from Him whose servant he is, and whose truth he has to announce.

You remember--to appeal at once to the highest example--how ever-present this thought of His mission was to the mind of our Lord and Master. His meat, so He told His disciples, was to do the will of Him that sent Him (John iv. 34). The word which He spake was not His own, but the Father's who sent Him (John xiv. 24). And so when the time came for His sending forth His disciples to carry on His work, it was as "Apostles," those sent, that the work was entrusted to them; and in the same spirit He prayed for them in His great intercessory prayer: "_As Thou didst send Me into the world, even so sent I them into the world_" (John xvii. 18).

If we keep this view of the evangelist as the missionary, ever before us, there is one fact regarding his position we can never lose sight of. He has no new truth of his own to declare, no new theories of his own to frame. The message which he has to deliver is not his own, but God's; and it must be his constant endeavour to learn that message for himself, and then, as God's servant, to announce it to others. Men may receive his message. If they do not, he dare not substitute any other.