John 4:35

LOOK ON THE FIELDS

‘Lift up your eyes, and look on the fields; for they are white already to harvest.’

John 4:35

‘Look on the fields.’ ‘Do you think,’ said the captain of the ship in which Robert Morrison was a passenger, to that brave pioneer missionary, ‘that you will make an impression upon four hundred million Chinese?’ ‘No, sir,’ replied Morrison, ‘but I believe that God will.’

I. Look with faith.—‘How often it is that the true source of spiritual power is out of sight, and for the time unknown; as with the preacher—of whom Faber tells us—whose success won for him universal admiration, but to whom it was revealed that that success was due, not to the weight of his learning or the force of his eloquence, but to the prayers of an illiterate man who incessantly pleaded with God for the salvation of souls.’

II. Look with thankfulness.—What a touching story this is. Bishop Hannington, on his way to Uganda in 1855, was murdered in Busoga by the chief Luba, acting under orders from King Mwanga. On April 8th, 1906, the son of this same Luba (Timothy Mubinyo) was baptized by Rev. J. E. M. Hannington, son of the Bishop. Or listen to the words of James Chalmers, who died at last at the hands of cannibals in New Guinea: ‘Recall the twenty-one years, give me back all its experience, give me its shipwrecks, give me its standings in the face of death, give it me surrounded with savages with spears and clubs, give it me back again with spears flying about me, with the club knocking me to the ground—give it me back, and I will still be your missionary.’ It is men like these who have written with their dying love a bar or two of the songs of heaven.

III. Look with hope.—Be sure India has no problem Christ cannot solve, Africa no sore Christ cannot heal, China no weakness Christ cannot remove. A hundred years ago nearly the whole heathen world was closed to the missionary: to-day almost every tribe is accessible.

—Rev. F. Harper.