When I was asked to take up the Bible study this morning, I felt that I would make it a Bible talk about the principles that have a special relation to the question of the work in foreign fields. The truth is so simple that sometimes we miss it by straining after something unnatural, something beyond ourselves. I remember how it used to be when I was a boy here in Battle Creek, even in the old meeting-house that stood here. As we were exhorted to be good, I would strain myself until my head would ache, trying to be good; and O, how glad I was when somebody put under my feet the simple truth that “if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins.” [Voices: Amen!]GCB April 9, 1901, page 153.2

Just so about the question of burdens for foreign fields. Word has been spoken about burdens,—and sometimes God does send burdens for special fields; but I have felt and have known, from some things said to me by friends that there is a danger that we shall begin to try to stretch ourselves beyond ourselves, in trying to get the burden. Yet that comes as simply as the belief that our sins are forgiven when God says that if we will confess, he will forgive.GCB April 9, 1901, page 153.3

You will remember the incident in Luke, of the man who had gone down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and had fallen among thieves. He was lying by the roadside, bruised and wounded and well-nigh dead, and there went by a priest and a Levite. I suppose they began to think about a burden, as to whether they should go to help that man. But they had their duties to perform in the temple, and they were hurrying to those, and I suppose they decided they could not turn aside. But a Samaritan came along, and he had compassion upon the man. He got down and helped him.GCB April 9, 1901, page 153.4

Now, it was simply the knowledge of a need that he could help, which gave the Samaritan the burden. And so, I believe, that has been the experience of everyone of these foreign workers that has felt a burden for foreign fields. They would all say that it came in just that simple way,—they knew there was a need abroad which they could help, and they were ready to let the compassionate heart of Jesus Christ beat in their hearts, and to go to meet the need. And it was this Spirit of God in the heart of that Samaritan; for God, first of all, had compassion upon the poor man by the wayside, and he simply found a channel by which he could manifest to that man his compassionate love.GCB April 9, 1901, page 153.5

I like to think of an illustration of this in our bodies,—how that a bruise or a cut in any part of the body, immediately sets every cell in the body to extra exertion to repair the damage. An ax struck into the trunk of a tree leaves a wound. The botanists tell us that every cell in that tree, from the trunk to the topmost bough, is stirred into new activity, and the stream of the healing life principle is sent down to that need to heal it. It is because God’s life as a living organism is in the tree and in the body, and it is the life working in it all. God’s life fills the world; the whole of it is full of his glory.GCB April 9, 1901, page 153.6

Well, now, if we are connected by faith to the stream of his life, and stop to see the need; if God has given us an experience in his word and work, and in the power of salvation, so that we know how to help those in need, we should not hesitate very long about placing ourselves where, in our hearts, we know we are most needed. We do not want to wait for some strange feeling. Faith is not feeling. We are to know that God sends, but not necessarily to look for some strange feeling, before being ready to go to minister to a simple need that we know very well.GCB April 9, 1901, page 153.7

It is a fact that many are misled about the question of burdens, and that an impulse is often taken as a burden. And every worker in the foreign field who has been any number of years away, has felt the depression of finding persons coming into the field impulsively, without understanding what they are to do, or why they come, then collapsing, right in the front of the battle. We are all more or less responsible. Workers in foreign fields have, perhaps, called for help as if the Foreign Board, or the committees, could manufacture the help and send it, instead of looking more to God. And then, too, in the home field, sometimes brethren, not understanding just the right principles, have not recognized the fact when individuals have given evidence that they were not called to go,—they were simply willing to be sent,—but were not called of God. They have sometimes come abroad, and later discovered their unpreparedness, and have said to us, “I believe they made a mistake in sending me; I needed a different preparation for the work.” So it comes to this,—simply that we must have a sober reliance upon God, and then, in the simplicity of the truth, take hold of God’s work just as he puts it in our hands.GCB April 9, 1901, page 153.8

We are not the only society that has had that experience. Every missionary society has learned a lesson by it. Not long ago there was a call made by the Methodist Mission in India for young workers, able to endure hardness, and many in America volunteered. Writing about it, Bishop Thoburn said: ‘The spirit of most of these young men is excellent, but nearly all of them have been painfully lacking in the kind of preparation which is needed for missionary work. A dozen or twenty years ago I might have accepted a good many of them, but India has certainly furnished enough exhibitions of the mistaken policy of sending out young people of both sexes, to do most difficult work, who are wholly unprepared for the situation which awaits them. I suppose no less than two hundred young people have gone to India during recent years, to engage in missionary work, and returned again without having accomplished anything of particular value.”GCB April 9, 1901, page 153.9

We may learn from the mistakes of others; and I do feel most anxious that our young people shall learn (and also those who are older and who have to guide the younger ones) to discriminate between impulse and the burden of the Lord, and that we shall understand that God must send us into the work, if we would have him stand by us. I felt the other day, while perfectly agreeing with everything that was said about going abroad, seeing the wolf, and returning, that I would like to say just one word of sympathy for those who may have been turned back,—and I can say it freely, because God has always led me so tenderly that I have never yet seen the wolf. I believe that in nearly every case of this kind it has been a fact that the needed preparation was lacking. Workers were sent into the field, and then have discovered themselves that they were not prepared for the work, and returned.GCB April 9, 1901, page 154.1

I believe I speak the thought of every worker in a foreign field when I say that we do not want any worker held abroad merely by the feeling that if he comes home, we shall find fault with him, even though his failure be a personal lack. It would not be in the interests of the fields. There is a principle in that which the Bible emphasizes. In the day of Gideon, the Lord sent the word to his army, “Whosoever is fearful and afraid, let him return and depart early.” [Voices: Amen!]GCB April 9, 1901, page 154.2

Ten or twelve years ago, in England, among a group of canvassers who came over, was one who simply looked at one town; he did not like the looks of it, and so turned around, and went back on the next boat. The Lord says if we feel that way, to depart early. And so it is in the interests of the foreign work, that we should not have a feeling that a man abroad must not come home. And aside from this question of failure because of personal lack, we must remember that very often the circumstances are such that to return or change the place of labor carries not a suggestion of lack of heart in the work.GCB April 9, 1901, page 154.3

I have often felt that we make too much of a distinction between home and foreign work. We feel that it is something so very strange to go abroad. I believe that every worker in a foreign field has seen people come into the field whose usefulness was marred, perhaps fatally, by a feeling of inflation, as though “I have been chosen to go abroad; I have been chosen to go into foreign fields.” And we at home help that on by keeping up that distinction, and putting around the foreign work a sort of halo of romance and glory. It makes me feel ashamed every time anybody talks to me that way. The foreign work is just the same as any other part of the Lord’s work. We have such a spirit of provincialism that we sometimes think it is a tremendous feat to go somewhere. But the world is really very small. The Lord counts all the nations of the earth “as the small dust of the balance: behold he taketh up the isles as a very little thing.” But sometimes men get an idea that the earth is so big that it turns their heads to go halfway around it. We simply want to go at the work quietly, without talking nonsense about it, and have good, simple, saving sense. The Lord’s work is the Lord’s work; saving souls is saving souls; and I can not feel the way some appear to feel about different spots on this earth. I never have been in a place yet, traveling about, but what I felt as if I would like to stop there and go to work.GCB April 9, 1901, page 154.4

If God sends you somewhere, go to that place, and go to work. That is all there is about it. Really, the most important thing in a foreign field is not the particular training the man has had (that is important), but it is the simple question as to whether he has good sense. It is just what the man is himself, jut the influence and force that he himself carries. That is what makes the man. Let him, then, be a medical man with a medical education, or let him be a preacher with experience in preaching the truth publicly; but no matter what the training, if there is not, down deep in the heart, a basis of good sense, just a settling down to the work of God without any nonsense, there will be a crushing, depressing failure. God calls us to take hold of this foreign work in a simple way, without recourse to methods and ideas, which popular religion sometimes resorts to in sending men and money into foreign fields. It is often taken up as something aside from their regular work. We are to do the work as the regular work of God, because the message is to go to every nation before the Lord comes.GCB April 9, 1901, page 154.5

We who are in America ought not to have the thought the foreigner is a strange being: for America is made up of “foreigners.” We get rid of that after we get out for a few years among other people, and we find that God “hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth.” Here in America the little children wonder why the children in India do not tumble off the earth, because, as it is thought, their heads are down. Over in India the children may think the same about American children. Sometime you will see Americans abroad who say: “Why, how strange everything is! How strangely they do this! How strange that man looks!” I have heard people talking that way, who were not conscious at all that the crowd was eyeing them because they looked so strange. We are just as strange to other people as they are to us. If the Lord will take away the self-consciousness that ruins us, he can help us to reach the people a great deal better than we have allowed him to do very often.GCB April 9, 1901, page 154.6

That thought of Americanism, of nationalism, is something to reckon with. I am an American. I am not ashamed of it; but I am not proud of it; and that makes all the difference in the world in being able to help people outside of America; for you take any man who is proud of the fact that he is an American, and he has erected a barrier between himself and every soul who is not an American. Anybody who has been in a foreign field has known this fact: Difficulties which perhaps it has taken years to clear away have been created by those who kept that national spirit forward. It is a part of the old paganism of Rome, that caused men to worship the genius of the empire, instead of God. That thing is so drilled into men that it clings to the natural heart. It was sometimes taught us in our schools, in the little school histories of the United States. It was worked into us, and made our hearts thrill with the fighting spirit. That same spirit keeps on thrilling in minds and hearts, even after men have taken up the work of God, and gone out into foreign fields.GCB April 9, 1901, page 154.7

The Lord wants to take that spirit out of our hearts. We are to take up this message of God in the spirit and power of Elijah. How did John the Baptist go forth when he bore the message of the coming Lord in the spirit and power of Elijah? We read in the first chapter of John: “There was a man sent from God, whose name was John.” He was “sent from God.” It makes all the difference in the world whether a man is sent from God, or whether he is sent from America or from some other land. You find this spirit of nationalism in all lands. Wherever you go, in every nation you will find that same national conceit, and every man feels like praising and glorifying his country. Why?—Simply because it has produced such a great man as I am; that is all. It is simply the conceit of the individual in all the people, that creates that national spirit of rivalry and self-exaltation that is at the bottom of nearly every war that stirs the surface of our earth.GCB April 9, 1901, page 154.8

That man John was “sent from God.” O, let us be sent from God! That is the way Jesus came on his mission. He knew that he “was come from God, and went to God,” and he could say: “He that sent me is with me.” It does one no good to take along from America a national feeling into the fields; but if you can be sent from God, and can say, “He that sent me is with me: the Father hath not left me alone,” you have got something a good deal closer to you than America. When Jesus knew he was sent from God, and went to God, he knew something that we need to know too. Too many are sent from America, and they go to America. We want to be sent from God, and to have God’s house as our home. [Voices: Amen!]GCB April 9, 1901, page 155.1

Abraham, the “father of the faithful,” who was sent out, “not knowing whither he went,” went simply because God called him away. He did not care where he went, so long as God was with him. God said of him that he and his children “were strangers and pilgrims on the earth.” He might have returned into the country out of which he came, we are told, if he had desired to do it; but he and those who had his faith testified that they were seeking, “a better country, that is, an heavenly: wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God: for he hath prepared for them a city.”GCB April 9, 1901, page 155.2

So many times friends have innocently asked me if I were not glad to be back again in my native land. Why, I can not feel that way at all. I am glad to see friends; glad to see my aged parents for the last time; but about the land, about the earth, how can I be glad about that? It is mainly like earth in any other place. If my work were here, I should be glad to be here; but my work is outside, and I am glad to be outside. I do believe if we let the Lord separate us from that provincialism, that spirit which the world calls patriotism, God will give us sentiments of another kind. The man going abroad who fosters that thing down in his heart, even though he may say to himself, “I will keep quiet about that; for I believe it will be discreet to do so, and not let the people know of it,” will find that it will come out in spite of his efforts to hold it inside, and that it will create the same thing in the foreigners’ hearts, that same spirit of nationalism and opposition, and there you have it—a barrier that separates men.GCB April 9, 1901, page 155.3

I pray that the Lord will give us his love from heaven, that we may see the brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God, and may understand that we have been born again! You remember what David says, in the eighty-seventh Psalm: “Glorious things are spoken of thee, O city of God. I will make mention of Rahab [Egypt, a great land, a magnificent country, so proud of itself] and Babylon [that was “the glory of kingdoms”] to them that know me: behold Philistia, and Tyre, with Ethiopia; this man was born there.” I suppose it would have been accounted a great credit to a man to have been born in Babylon, or to have been a member of the Egyptian kingdom. But what does the Psalmist say?—“And of Zion it shall be said, This and that man was born in her: and the highest himself shall establish her. The Lord shall count, when he writeth up the people, that this man was born there.”GCB April 9, 1901, page 155.4

O, we want to be born again! I do not know of any more intensely practical issue in the consideration of the details of foreign missions than just that; and I believe every worker from abroad would say so. We have seen ruin just upon that point. I believe that when the Pentecostal blessing comes, it will come into some of these details, and straighten them out. We shall get hold of God. I do not care, when the Lord writes up his people, whether he puts it down (of course he would not do it) that I was born in the good State of Minnesota; but if he will put it down that this man was born there, born from above, born into the heavenly Zion, then he will establish me with his people. So I believe we want to get so thoroughly born again that we shall leave out these little trappings of nationalism.GCB April 9, 1901, page 155.5

This may be a suggestion to teachers in our schools, in the teaching of history, to beware lest we train the youth and the children into these things that have made it so hard for multitudes to go out into the work of God.GCB April 9, 1901, page 155.6

As to the question of training workers, it is evident that the worker must be trained at home in the work itself. It is not that the man can get the training at home that may fit him for special details abroad; but still it is a fact that while the cry from abroad is not for clever, brilliant men at all, but for simple men, it is a cry for seasoned men. A stick of timber may be good and all right; but if it is not seasoned, it may give way, when the strain is put upon it. Just so with workers. We want to be seasoned in the work of God, that we may know in our hearts, and in our lives, and that the brethren may know, that we have settled down to God’s work in a sober, sensible, serious way. Then you can risk that man almost anywhere on this earth.GCB April 9, 1901, page 155.7

Of course the question of special adaptability must come into this matter of burdens for fields. Sometimes men have a burden to go to a field to engage in work for which they are not at all adapted—not that they are not good men, but every man has his work, and there is a place for every man. I remember some years ago, when we were throwing the canvassers’ net over America to get workers into England, among those who came was one brother who could not do a thing. He was sent for to come up to London, for the canvassing agent could not help him onto his feet. We all loved that man; for he was a simple child of God. He came from rather a wild region of the West, and simply by being taken out of his element, and out of his place, and dropped down in the cities of England, he could not get on. He was a splendid man, and I hope he is in the work yet, for we all loved that man just from association during the few hours he was with us. But he himself said he was in the wrong place. In considering burdens for fields, we need to view matters in a practical way; for it is a fact that it is not a flighty feeling, a missionary impulse, that should send us out into God’s work, but a sober consideration of the details of the work, of our experience in it, as to whether we are exactly fitted, or adapted to that line of work. God can then impress our minds and lead us, and lead the heathen.GCB April 9, 1901, page 155.8

It is said of those that came out to help David at Ziklag, that they were men who could handle the bow, could throw spears, and could hurl stones with the right hand and with the left. That is about the kind of workers that are most needed in some fields,—men that can do more than one thing. Perhaps there is need of a man for a certain place. We call for some one especially to fill that place. After months have elapsed circumstances change, and the man is needed for something else. That is a point to be taken into consideration in examining ourselves in listening to the needs of fields, and in accepting the counsels of brethren regarding the work in any field.GCB April 9, 1901, page 156.1

The Lord desires us to be sober, sensible men in the things that concern his work, and to decide from facts and evidence and information, in the fear of God, and then he can us give definite burdens.GCB April 9, 1901, page 156.2

When the call came for me to go to India, the brethren asked me if I had any special burden for that field. If I had not, they would not send me. I did not have a burden for the work in India. I had a burden for the work where I was. But I told them that I realized the immediate need of help there at the time; and if I were needed, I would have a burden to go there, and would go very quickly if I could get away from where I was. So it came about, and I felt that I had a burden to go there, and so did my wife. It was simply from the consideration of facts. I do not say that that is the way it is going to come to everyone. But let us consider this, that abroad, just as at home, we can move about, we can go from place to place without any special flow of feeling, but we must know the Lord’s leading.GCB April 9, 1901, page 156.3

Now the thought very often comes up in a practical way with young people about leaving home, and with fathers and mothers about letting their children go. Very often it is on some such personal detail that things are decided. There is a principle to recognize, and that is that when we go out to teach the people, we have to teach a message that may separate a man from his own kindred, and his decision is forced, as so often in heathen lands, as to whether he can leave his kindred and home associations for the sake of Jesus. If we do not have that same spirit in our hearts, how can we help others into the experience that they need? And so far as parents are concerned, some of us, as we have gone on in the work, have seen our parents grow so old that they can hardly hope to live to the coming of the Lord; but if workers had been more ready to go out, and if parents had been more willing for their children to go out, it may be that the work would have been done, and the years would not be still bending the forms of the aged.GCB April 9, 1901, page 156.4

The Lord wants us to understand that his work is his business, and we are to take up his business in a businesslike way. Why, it is so strange that we should feel about the Lord’s work in a way that men of civil affairs, in military affairs, do not feel. Men go to India and to Africa just as a matter of government business, and they do not stop to consider whether they have any special emotions, any special inflation about working here or there, but the call comes to go; they have had the training and the drill by which they have been fitted to do the work. They simply pack up and go.GCB April 9, 1901, page 156.5

Another thought that has come to me, as I have watched the foreign work for the past twelve or fourteen years, is that one thing that unfits workers to do the work of the Lord in distant lands is that here at home in the work too often we are working as within sight of one another. It is too often with the thought as to whether the brethren are appreciating us, whether they are seeing us, whether we are receiving their encouragement. One may get so accustomed to working in a crowd that he does not realize how much he is depending upon the organized work that keeps him moving. That worker may get thrown out into the field where he has got to encourage himself in his God, as David did, and he fails because he has not learned how to do this. I believe that every worker at home ought to educate himself to work as in the sight of God alone. It is true that workers need encouragement and we must encourage others. But let us get such a hold upon God ourselves that we will not need anybody to encourage us. And sometimes when I hear the brethren pleading that the workers at home should encourage the workers in foreign fields, I think, “O my soul! what have we to discourage us?” There is nothing in the foreign field to discourage us except personal sin, and it is so easy to go to the Lord with that. Let us work on the principle that we are not depending upon anybody’s attention, that we are working for God, and doing his work.GCB April 9, 1901, page 156.6

You can not always tell who is doing the most work. When everybody is pulling, you can not tell which one is pulling the hardest. Perhaps some one behind is pushing, and is doing more to move the chariot than the man in front leading in the pulling. So, if we will take up the work of God as sacred, but yet simple, matter-of-fact business, putting away all nonsense about it, and be simple men and women, God can use us.GCB April 9, 1901, page 156.7

It is not always a test of a man to have him working in a place where everything is rushing at fiery speed, and reports are being made, and tremendous things said about it. Another test of a man’s metal is to be out in a place where there is not very much said about the work. But we want to cultivate the spirit of simply going every day in God’s work with the burden of souls. When Sampson met the lion and rent it, we read that he did not even tell his father and mother that he had torn a lion in pieces. As I have witnessed in India the distortions in some of the missionary reports. I have felt as if we needed the inspiration of God to do the work; we need the inspiration of God to make a true report of it. There is the temptation to make a big report in order to get mission funds. It has caused many to scoff at all missionary reports. We must heed that lesson, and understand that we are working, not to report some great thing, but for God; and in the last great day he will report all about it. Still we do want to tell of what God has wrought. We must have that, but O, we do want to get self out of it so that God can do the work. In that fifty-first chapter of Isaiah the Lord speaks about the work of the message in these days: “I have put my words i thy mouth, and I have covered thee in the shadow of mine hand, that I may plant the heavens, and lay the foundations of the earth, and say unto Zion, Thou art my people.” So, if God in his mercy will only cover us up so that we may understand the greatness of his work, and our own littleness, then we can take up his work in a practical way.GCB April 9, 1901, page 156.8

I am so glad that we need not feel that God leaves us to ourselves. I have felt anxious to talk with workers aboutGCB April 9, 1901, page 156.9

India, and yet have felt that I did not want anything of human choice in anything; but I am glad that the Lord has come into these meetings, and has given them this missionary turn, so that hearts may be turned to seek God. The needs of the field are great; but it is not simply numbers that are needed in any field, but it is the right ones, the simple ones. We need not think that it requires some great human qualification to work abroad. Just simple sinners, such as we are, saved by the power of God, in the place where God wants us, can do his work. And so the Lord’s Spirit must seek out and choose his own workers. We need to be yielded to him, so that, as he chooses, there may not be in any one of our hearts a holding back, but that we may say, when the Lord calls us, “Here am I, O Lord, send me.”GCB April 9, 1901, page 157.1

THE CAPTIVE EXILE

BIENNIAL REPORT OF DISTRICT 8