Chapter III: An Habitual Self-Surrender and Consecration to Christ and His

WORK.--Selfishness, in its more insidious forms, endangers the life of a pastor. Outwardly, by office, he is consecrated to the service of Christ, and for this very reason he is less likely to detect, deep down at the springs of his living, the presence and power of a self-love, in the form of pride, envy, self-will, self-indulgence, and ambition, which may be, after all, the controlling force in his inner life. The danger is here the greater because, its growth having been unperceived, the man is unconscious of its control, and because, with all "the deceitfulness of sin," it lurks stealthily, but all the more potentially, within the sacred forms and associations of a consecrated office. Hence the necessity of frequent and rigid self-examination. A man must interrogate himself, and with careful introspection seek to detect the real forces that control his life. There should be pauses in his career when he will stand alone in the presence-chamber of the Omniscient One, and cry, "Search me, O God, and know my heart; try me, and know my thoughts; and see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting" (Ps. cxxxix. 23, 24). The best lives have found great value in such special seasons privately set apart for fasting, prayer, and self-examination, as the navigator, in the perils of his voyage, stops to take observation of the sun and stars and make certain what is his position and whither the winds and currents are bearing him. Then, with vision thus clarified, and in full view of his real position, he should make a distinct renewal of self-dedication to God, giving up himself, with all he is and has, unreservedly to Him.

Without this self-renunciation and self-devotion to Christ, as an habitual fact, the inner life will be without spiritual power. Jesus, in His promise of the Holy Spirit and of the Christ-presence, makes this the one, essential condition: "If ye love Me, keep My commandments, and I will pray the Father, and He shall give you another Comforter" (John xiv. 15, 16). A true consecration of self to Christ, therefore, assures the presence of the Holy Spirit as the revealer of Christ within the soul. This was the habitual attitude of the apostle Paul. He says: "The life that I now live in the flesh, I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me" (Gal. ii. 20). Self was nothing, Christ everything; for when confronted with peril of death, he said: "None of these things move me, neither count I my life dear unto myself, so that I might finish my course with joy, and the ministry, which I have received of the Lord Jesus, to testify the Gospel of the grace of God" (Acts xx. 24). Thus self-dedicated, he received the promise: The Spirit wrought in him mightily, filling him with Divine life and power. So utter was his self-abnegation, and so all-absorbing his love of souls, that, like Moses of old (Ex. xxxii. 32), he "could wish," were it right and would it secure their salvation, to be himself "accursed from Christ" for them (Rom. ix. 3). With like self-devotion to souls, Rutherford, the eminent Scotch minister, while assuring his flock that they "were the objects of his tears, care, fear, and daily prayers," said "My witness is above, that your heaven would be two heavens to me, and the salvation of you all as two salvations to me." A ministry thus self-forgetting is of necessity a ministry of power; for God Himself works in it, as all history has shown.