IT is well to trace the guidance of His eye, and feel conscious that He has marked out the path that you tread, and is with you in it. You have the sanction of His own word for the plat you are in as regards the Church, and the place you have left as respects the word.
What can alone give a charm to separation of this kind is, that by their means we are brought more into the place of His mind on earth, where, consequently, we may count upon His being personally with us, and this is Everything. Where else, indeed, can He be in these last days, or in earlier times either The opening of John’s Gospel, show us the mutual delight it was to Jesus and His disciples to be thus together When two of them said, “Rabbi, where dwellest Thou? He said unto them Come and see. They came and saw where He dwelt, and abode with Him that day.’
Sometimes I have thought, who was the happiest in this little group? Certainly He was who made them so happy, and whose happiness consisted in doing it. One of the two, in the conscious delight of the house, and who He was that dwelt there, must needs go out to bring others in; and here we learn on first lessons of communion and service. Personal intimacy with Jesus where He dwells, makes up our sweetest compound: in communion, and then becomes the constraining power by which we go ford to bring the outside ones into the house in devoted service.
It is Jesus himself that is thus the source and spring of all joy in the hear! that has found Him, and it is this nearness to Himself at the very place where He dwells that makes any like Him. “Andrew first findeth his own brothel Simon, and he brought him to ‘Jesus!’ The most brotherly act he ever did, and which connected him morally with Josue (in the errand that brought Him down from heaven), was to separate Simon from the place and pursuits which he followed, and bring him into the presence and intimacies of the Christ! One house in the wide world, and one Person who dwelt there, and who made it what it was, became the now gathering Center for this earth. You and I, by grace, have found our welcome in it, never to leave it, except it be in devotedness of heart to tell the outsiders what we have found, and to bring them into it: “Come and see.”
I must remark the significance that attaches to the action of Jesus„ who wrote upon Simon his new name; for in this introduction on the part of Andrew, Jesus will not know Simon in his old name and state, but says, “Thou shalt be called Cephas... a stone.” The way in which Peter holds this precious stone up to the light in his first epistle (ch. 2), and how it glistens to his eye and heart as a living stone, is evident enough. This, too, is what we individually are by grace, in Church connection with Christ the elect. Stone, and the Corner-Stone and take our places in the spiritual house, as anointed for the holy priesthood (2:5), or crowned as a royal priesthood (2:9), to show forth the virtues of Him who has called us out of darkness into His marvelous light.
The good Lord keep us more in character: and consistency with this “spiritual house,” by our abiding with Him in the intimacies of the dwelling-house, into which He first brought us when He wrote, so to speak, His Father’s name upon our foreheads, and gave us to bear His own name along with us, instead of our own!
May you in confiding love be kept in the path till He comes, in the power and sweetness of that new name in the white stone which nobody knows but he that receiveth it.