Go Teach All Nations
707
of the love of God. Heaven stands indignant at the neglect shown to
the souls of men. Would we know how Christ regards it? How would
a father and mother feel, did they know that their child, lost in the
cold and the snow, had been passed by, and left to perish, by those
who might have saved it? Would they not be terribly grieved, wildly
indignant? Would they not denounce those murderers with wrath hot
as their tears, intense as their love? The sufferings of every man are
the sufferings of God’s child, and those who reach out no helping hand
to their perishing fellow beings provoke His righteous anger. This is
the wrath of the Lamb. To those who claim fellowship with Christ, yet
have been indifferent to the needs of their fellow men, He will declare
in the great Judgment day, “I know you not whence ye are; depart
from Me, all ye workers of iniquity.”
Luke 13:27
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In the commission to His disciples, Christ not only outlined their
work, but gave them their message. Teach the people, He said, “to
observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you.” The disciples
were to teach what Christ had taught. That which He had spoken, not
only in person, but through all the prophets and teachers of the Old
Testament, is here included. Human teaching is shut out. There is no
place for tradition, for man’s theories and conclusions, or for church
legislation. No laws ordained by ecclesiastical authority are included
in the commission. None of these are Christ’s servants to teach. “The
law and the prophets,” with the record of His own words and deeds,
are the treasure committed to the disciples to be given to the world.
Christ’s name is their watchword, their badge of distinction, their bond
of union, the authority for their course of action, and the source of
their success. Nothing that does not bear His superscription is to be
recognized in His kingdom.
The gospel is to be presented, not as a lifeless theory, but as a living
force to change the life. God desires that the receivers of His grace
shall be witnesses to its power. Those whose course has been most
offensive to Him He freely accepts; when they repent, He imparts
to them His divine Spirit, places them in the highest positions of
trust, and sends them forth into the camp of the disloyal to proclaim
His boundless mercy. He would have His servants bear testimony
to the fact that through His grace men may possess Christlikeness of
character, and may rejoice in the assurance of His great love. He would
have us bear testimony to the fact that He cannot be satisfied until the