Getting the Truth Home

The fruit of the righteous is a tree of life; and he that winneth souls is wise. PROVERBS 11:30

Catherine Booth had no patience with the idea that working for God needs no thought. In the address How to Work for God with Success, which stands in her book Godliness and among her sermons, she set out what she called the needful qualifications for successful labour. Some of it has already appeared in these pages: her plea for naturalness, her scorn for the lukewarm, her counting of the cost. But the heart of the address is about the worker before the work. She wanted to know why so much Christian effort produced so little.

The laws of the harvest

She began with a farmer. It would be useless, she said, to scatter seed on unbroken ground. You must plough and harrow, sow carefully and at the right time, and then water and weed and wait. The kingdom of grace, she was sure, has its laws as certainly as the kingdom of nature, and the worker who will not learn them should not be surprised at an empty barn.

Behold, the husbandman waiteth for the precious fruit of the earth, and hath long patience for it, until he receive the early and latter rain. JAMES 5:7

What struck her was the contrast with ordinary life. People give years of labour and thought to learning an earthly profession, she said, and yet expect to do God’s work without any trouble at all — without planning, without experiment, without wrestling with God for wisdom. Soldiers study stratagems to take the enemy by surprise, and yet, she said, it is “far harder work to take souls than it is to take cities.”

Her counsel was not to wait until one felt competent. Begin at once, she said, but begin in the right way: by praying much for God to show you how, and in “a humble, submissive, teachable spirit.”

If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him. JAMES 1:5

Not delivered, but driven home

The second qualification was the one she pressed hardest. She disliked the common phrase about a preacher delivering his message. She wished the word had never been coined in connection with Christian work. Our business, she said, is “not deliver it; but drive it home.” God has made us responsible not for saying the truth but for getting it in, “fixing it in the conscience as a red-hot iron.” She mocked the genteel manner that asks a congregation, if it pleases, to consider being converted.

For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any twoedged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. HEBREWS 4:12

Her model was Paul, and she noticed how he did it. He did not lay the truth before people and walk away. He carried them on his heart. For three years at Ephesus he warned them night and day with tears. “He wept it in, as well as drove it in,” she said — with logic and eloquence, but with tears and the power of the Holy Ghost as well.

Therefore watch, and remember, that by the space of three years I ceased not to warn every one night and day with tears. ACTS 20:31

There are two kinds of ministry, she said, public or private. One is burdened and will not rest until the word has gone in. The other rolls it out like a lesson and goes home, holding itself in no way answerable for what follows. The first is what happened at Pentecost.

Now when they heard this, they were pricked in their heart, and said unto Peter and to the rest of the apostles, Men and brethren, what shall we do? ACTS 2:37

You cannot give what you have not got

Here she reached the root. How is such power to be had? Not by raising the voice. She laid down a principle that every preacher, teacher and parent ought to ponder: “you will never make any other soul realise the verities of eternal things any further than you realise them yourself.” A dreamy, comfortable, half-asleep Christian will produce dreamy, comfortable, half-asleep converts. The hearer receives exactly the degree of reality the worker has, and no more.

This, she thought, explained much of what she saw around her: what she called “a sickly crop of sentimental converts,” born of a religion with no depth of earth and no grasp on the soul. The cure was not a better technique. It was to go to God. If you want to pour out living waters on others, she said, you must “drink largely at the fountain yourself.” If you have not enough of the Holy Ghost to make your words felt, go to your closet until you have, for this kind, she reminded them, comes forth by nothing but prayer and fasting (Mark 9:29).

No holding back the sword

Her last qualification was surrender, and she used a startling text to make it. The prophet pronounced a curse on the man who did the Lord’s work half-heartedly, and she applied it to the Christian worker who is afraid to wound.

Cursed be he that doeth the work of the LORD deceitfully, and cursed be he that keepeth back his sword from blood. JEREMIAH 48:10

The soldiers of this age, she complained, will thrust the sword a little way in, but not to the heart. “They dare not touch a man to the quick,” because they are thinking of what people will say of them rather than what God will say. The hardest test, she knew, is not an enemy but a friend whose good opinion we want. Success needs complete abandonment, like the soldier who does not stop to count what the battle will cost him. Paul had it.

But none of these things move me, neither count I my life dear unto myself, so that I might finish my course with joy. ACTS 20:24

Weighing it

There is much gold here, and some danger. The talk of laws and success can be heard as though a right method will guarantee results, as it seemed to in some revival teaching of her century. Scripture puts it otherwise. The farmer sows and waters, but the increase is God’s, and it grows he knows not how (Mark 4:27).

I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase. 1 CORINTHIANS 3:6

She knew this herself; she told her hearers that God would give the success if they would do the work. But her emphasis on responsibility, heard by an anxious conscience, can turn service into strain. Her language of the sword, too, needs the love that she put under it. Driving truth home is not the same as browbeating, and a wound given without tears seldom heals. Read with those cautions, her address is one of the most useful things she wrote: a plain call to think, to pray, to be real before God, and then to mean what we say.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Think of one area of Christian service you are involved in. When did you last give an hour’s consecutive thought and prayer to how it might be done better?

2. Ask whether you deliver the truth or get it home. After your next conversation about Christ, ask what you actually expected to happen.

3. Take her principle personally: others will not realise eternal things further than you do. Set aside time this week simply to be with God before you try to speak for Him.

4. Is there a friend you have never been honest with about his soul because you value his good opinion? Pray for the love and courage to speak.

5. If you have laboured long and seen little, read 1 Corinthians 3:6–7 and leave the increase with God.

A PRAYER

Lord of the harvest, I have worked for You carelessly, without thought and without prayer, and then wondered why so little came of it.

Make me teachable. Show me how to sow, and when, and give me patience to wait for the rain.

Let me not merely say Your truth, but carry it on my heart, and weep it in where I cannot drive it in. Fill me first, that I may have something to give.

Take away my fear of what people will say. The increase is Yours; make me faithful in the sowing. Amen.