"Woe is unto me, if I preach not the Gospel!" (1 Cor.9.16)

The life story of the Apostle Paul is testimony to the passionate conviction with which he penned these words to the Corinthian Church. Just as fraught with meaning as his other declaration of similar import "for me to live is Christ", enshrining his fixed determination to proclaim abroad throughout his life the evangel he found on the Damascus road. The Christian faith is a missionary religion and without the evangelical fervour that leads its devotees to proclaim aloud by every means within their power the message they have received, that faith becomes a sterile and useless thing. The man who serves the Lord Christ merely to ensure his own eternal salvation and has no heed for others who also need the message is likely to find himself in the company of those others when, at the last, our Lord makes up the personnel of that devoted company which is to constitute the "ministry of reconciliation" (2 Cor.;5.18-20), his instrument for the conversion of the world in the Millennial Age now so evidently close at hand.

There is a maxim which was quoted more frequently a couple of generations ago than it is today: "the Christian community which loses the missionary spirit signs its own death warrant". History testifies to its truth. More than one quite notable reform in the Christian world, having its rise around the person of some celebrated preacher or evangelist, has grown and prospered in the power of a significant advance in the understanding of Christian truth, a significantly clearer and deeper understanding of the Divine Plan and perhaps the importance of the times in which they live. The impulse to spread the message—and perhaps success in winning the interest and support of the many who become adherent in their turn—evokes an enthusiasm and creates a fellowship which then becomes a force in the Christian world which for a term of years plays an important part in the onward development of Christian truth.

But that generation passes, with its leaders, and its successor in its turn. And now the pioneers have nearly all gone to their Lord, and the third knows of the battles and labours—and the success and triumphs—of those days only by repute. Then comes the fourth generation, born long after the first fresh enthusiasm has run its course and subsided and that fourth cannot even visualise the zeal and euphoria which characterised the first. So the movement becomes quieter, more addicted to submerging the original emphasis upon complete and utter consecration to the Lord's Cause to a position below the other interests of this life—career, family, spare-time pursuits. And because this is more characteristic of the denominations generally, they begin to recede into that same background and forget—if they ever understood—the advance in Divine revelation which created the fellowship which they inherited. And so the lamp goes out in the Temple of God, because Eli has gone to sleep.

But always there is Samuel, resolute and eager to maintain and hold aloft the light which galvanised those early pioneers to do the work they did. Though the love of many wax cold, as our Lord said it would; though the great deeds of the past and the proclamation of the message which was once shouted from the house-tops be heard now only in muted guise, there still remain those who once caught the vision and gave themselves in utter devotion to the furtherance of that gospel, the gospel of the kingdom, which Jesus said must be proclaimed in all the world for a witness before the end could come. These are they who can say with Jeremiah the prophet of Israel in a day which was so frighteningly similar to the day in which we now live "his word was in my heart as a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I was weary with forbearing, and I could not stay" (Jer.20.9). Though all Israel reject his message—and they did—he was determined to proclaim it to the end—and he did. And in the end he was vindicated, for what the Lord had commissioned him to declare came to pass. That outcome was to Israel's dismay but a vindication of the progress of the Divine Plan and of the prophet.

Today, more than ever, we need the spirit of Jeremiah. He began his course as a young man of perhaps twenty-five under good king Josiah when the people were true worshippers. He lived through the reigns of four successive bad kings and saw Israel desolated at the last. But he never lost faith. Like him in spirit, we today are called to continue, without faltering, the proclamation of the word which is in our hearts: Christ is Lord; the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.

AOH