We make calls out of our own spiritual consecration, but when we get right with God He brushes all these aside, and rivets us with a pain that is terrific to one thing we never dreamed of, and for one radiant flashing moment we see what He is after, and we say - "Here am I, send me."

This call has nothing to do with personal sanctification, but with being made broken bread and poured-out wine. God can never make us wine if we object to the fingers He uses to crush us with. If God would only use His own fingers, and make me broken bread and poured-out wine in a special way! But when He uses someone whom we dislike, or some set of circumstances to which we said we would never submit, and makes those the crushers, we object. We must never choose the scene of our own martyrdom. If ever we are going to be made into wine, we will have to be crushed; you cannot drink grapes. Grapes become wine only when they have been squeezed.

I wonder what kind of finger and thumb God has been using to squeeze you, and you have been like a marble and escaped? You are not ripe yet, and if God had squeezed you, the wine would have been remarkably bitter. To be a sacramental personality means that the elements of the natural life are presenced by God as they are broken providentially in His service. We have to be adjusted into God before we can be broken bread in His hands. Keep right with God and let Him do what He likes, and you will find that He is producing the kind of bread and wine that will benefit His other children.

The Christian worker has to be a sacramental "go-between," to be so identified with his Lord and the reality of His Redemption that He can continually bring His creating life through him.

It is not the strength of one man's personality being superimposed on another, but the real presence of Christ coming through the elements of the worker's life.

When we preach the historic facts of the life and death of Our Lord as they are conveyed in the New Testament, our words are made sacramental, God uses them on the ground of His Redemption to create in those who listen that which is not created otherwise.

If we preach the effects of Redemption in human life instead of the revelation regarding Jesus, the result in those who listen is not new birth, but refined spiritual culture, and the Spirit of God cannot witness to it because such preaching is in another domain.

We have to see that we are in such living sympathy with God that as we proclaim His truth He can create in souls the things which He alone can do.

What a wonderful personality! What a fascinating man! Such marvelous insight! What chance has the Gospel of God through all that?

It cannot get through, because the line of attraction is always the line of appeal.

If a man attracts by his personality, his appeal is along that line; if he is identified with his Lord's personality, then the appeal is along the line of what Jesus Christ can do.

The danger is to glory in men; Jesus says we are to lift Him up.

The suggestion is this: all ministry for the Master must be possessed of the sacrificial spirit of the Master. If Paul is to help in the redemption of Rome, he must himself incarnate the death of Calvary. If he is to be a minister of Life, he must “die daily” (1 Corinthians 15:31 KJV). The spirit of Calvary is to be reincarnate in Ephesus, in Athens, in Rome . . . the sacrificial succession is to be maintained through the ages, and we are to “fill up in [our] flesh what is still lacking in regard to Christ’s afflictions.”

Here, then, is a principle: the gospel of a broken heart demands the ministry of bleeding hearts. As soon as we cease to bleed, we cease to bless. When our sympathy loses its pangs, we can no longer be the servants of the Passion. I do not know how any Christian service is to be fruitful if the servant is not primarily baptized in the spirit of a suffering compassion. We can never heal the needs we do not feel. Tearless hearts can never be the heralds of the Passion. We must bleed if we would be the ministers of the saving blood. We must, by our own suffering sympathies, “fill up in [our] flesh what is still lacking in regard to Christ’s afflictions.”

Are we in the succession? J. H. JOWETT

Ignatius said, when facing the lions in the arena, “I am a grain of God. Let me be ground between the teeth of lions if I may thus become bread to feed God’s people.” Were such martyred lives wasted? Thrown away? Is any life wasted that becomes seed-corn to produce bread for the world?

The way to make nothing of our lives is to be very careful of them. The way to make our lives an eternal success is to do with them just what Christ did with His.

Watch the opportunities to “fill up . . . what is still lacking in regard to Christ’s afflictions.” How many of us can show Him wounds that worship Him? SEED THOUGHTS CALENDAR