XXV.

St. Barnabas: A Missionary Model.

ACTS xi. 23, 24.

"Who, when he came, and had seen the grace of God, was glad, and exhorted them all, that with purpose of heart they would cleave unto the Lord. For he was a good man, and full of the Holy Ghost and of faith: and much people was added unto the

Lord."

THE

HE Church of Christ seems always to have been taken by surprise at every call it has received from its great Head to take a fresh step onward, and gather in new nations for Christ. God and His promises, and the events by which they are fulfilled, have been ever before and in advance, and the Church has been left behind, following indeed, but with slow, laggard, reluctant steps. It enters on each fresh field of enterprise with many fears and misgivings, feeling its way and planting its step with such extreme caution oftentimes, and so oppressed and appalled with the difficulties, as almost to anticipate and even court defeat; and when it so happens that its feeble efforts are largely overpaid, and its unfaithful fears rebuked, it is ever ready to exclaim in the spirit of wonder depicted by the prophet of old: "Then shalt thou say in thy heart, Who hath begotten me these, seeing I have lost my children, and am desolate, a captive, and removing to and fro? and who hath brought up these? Behold, I was left alone: these, where had they been?"* At * Isa. xlix. 21.

the beginning of these events, of which our text describes the sequel, we find there was no forwardness, no spring of energetic movement on the part of the early Christians to claim for Christ the inheritance of the Gentiles, to enter on the new lands given in possession to His Church.

As regards themselves it was not so much of fixed purpose, but as an accidental circumstance, that the Greeks heard the glad tidings of the Gospel. At haphazard the seed fell where it was not intended or expected it should drop: and now they began in actual truth to realize, spite of sad misgivings, that the field was the world, as our Lord had said. A crop was springing up upon a surface of earth, where to their Jewish prejudices the sowing of the word seemed a banned and proscribed thing. "The hand of the Lord was with them; "* i.e. the Spirit wrought with the word: that which seemed as "our report" before, was now felt to be "the arm of the Lord." Many faces and hearts of poor desolate wanderers in earth's darkness were turned Christwards, turned to the Sun of righteousness; and the Church in Jerusalem had just listened, perhaps with some degree of bewilderment and amazement, to the first report (strictly speaking) of missionary success which Church history records. That scattering of the Church about the time of the death of Stephen had issued in most unlooked-for and unsuspected results. Some of them, of those scattered ones, 66 were men of Cyprus and Cyrene, which when they were come to Antioch, spake unto the Grecians, preaching the Lord Jesus." It was natural to suppose that, as in the case of the fresh formation of the Church in Samaria, some of + Acts xi. 20.

* Acts xi. 21.

the very chiefest apostles would have been sent to gather into the fold this new promising flock, and to establish it in apostolic order, doctrine, and discipline. Barnabas was designated to this weighty and responsible office; and it is likely that the designation of him was recognised as entitling him to be ranked in the glorious company of the apostles. Let us consider him to-day as first a type, a striking and instructive type, of what the missionary spirit in us all should be; secondly, of what the missionaries to the heathen in general should strive to be; and thirdly, of what may be looked and hoped for from a native ministry, duly qualified and prepared, and endued, after the manner of God's holy apostle St. Barnabas, with singular gifts of the Holy Ghost. May the consideration of it be blessed to many, yea, to all here, to the quickening of our zeal, to the summoning and rallying of ourselves to more self-sacrificing effort, to the fortifying of ourselves to encounter the objections and the scornful indignities heaped upon the work of God, as well as the misstatements and misrepresentations with which it is assailed.

First. What the missionary spirit in us all should be, we may in good measure gather from what we are taught of the character of Barnabas. He was

a man whose spirit of self-sacrifice was conspicuous from the first. Being deeply and solemnly convinced of that claim which a suffering, dying, and risen Saviour has upon His disciples, that self should die in them, and that their life henceforth should be for His glory, he showed his sense of this in the directest and most straightforward manner, in a way, to which not every man is called, but which is a great fact, when it does happen; somewhat startling and embarrassing to

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the world, whose conclusions as to the powerlessness of the Gospel are rudely shaken and belied. He voluntarily renounced the property that by inheritance was his own, counting it a trammel, of which he must divest himself, that he might be free to place himself at Christ's disposal, to do His bidding, and go whithersoever He might send him. So he stands there ready, with his loins girt, for whatsoever service the Lord has need of him. And here is the essence and ground of the true, abiding missionary spirit, the profoundly inwrought conviction, that none of us liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself." The romance and picturesqueness of it may enlist indeed for a little while; but when it becomes an oft-repeated and every-day story, it becomes intolerably tame and dull. Enlivening incidents, entertaining descriptions of life and manners; ethnological detail; a kind of philanthropic enthusiasm about human progress; the spread of freedom, enlightenment; notions of human brotherhood; reciprocity of commercial relations,—all these, and many such subordinate accessories, can do little more than cast a faint and vanishing halo about that which is the real core and true sunlight of the mission work, which is the making known of the glorious Gospel of the blessed God unto all nations, for the obedience of faith the Good Shepherd bringing home the strayed sheep on His shoulders, rejoicing, from wherever in this world's vast wilderness they may be found. Let a man's soul fasten upon this truth, "The love of Christ constraineth us;"† let him have an inward sight of His glory, as seen in redemption, in the original design and motive, the progressive steps and * Rom. xiv. 7. + 2 Cor. v. 14.

acts of it, the present assurance and eternal fruits of it then is such an one's spirit stirred up to offer willingly of his substance. It is not content with shabby, meagre pretences of doing and giving; but in a spirit of honest childlike self-surrender it ventures itself: it comes "to the help of the Lord against the mighty."*

I said, childlike surrender; for it requires this. Christ believed on in the world is of the mystery of godliness. After laying bare something of this mystery to His disciples in the tenth chapter of St. Luke, we are told, "Jesus rejoiced in spirit, and said, I thank Thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that Thou hast hid these thing from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes."t

But the next point in which the true missionary spirit was brightly illustrated in him was the joy he felt at the triumphs of God's grace: "When he came, and had seen the grace of God, was glad." The whole train of circumstances seemed so expressly adapted to illustrate God's grace. There had been no large, far-sighted plan contrived by the Council of the Apostles at Jerusalem. It was by a series of perfectly undesigned coincidences that the Gospel had come to the Grecians in Antioch, and perhaps other towns. They saw the truth of that word remarkably borne out : "Behold, I have created the smith that bloweth the coals in the fire, and that bringeth forth an instrument for his work; and I have created the waster to destroy."‡

The scattering which had taken place was not the scattering of a broken army, or the scattering of the stones of a demolished building; but the scatter

*

Judges v. 23.

+ Luke x. 21.

Isa. liv. 16.