The Outlet

Someone has said that the disciples were gazing when they should have been going. They were now commissioned to go first to the upper room until Pentecost, which means fifty days; that is, fifty days after the Passover was the feast of Pentecost. The real Passover had come at last, “The Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world” had been slain, and fifty days from His slaying the Holy Spirit came with the real feast of Pentecost, making His advent into this world, blessed Third Person of the Trinity. When He came, what Jesus said to the disciples was literally and actually fulfilled, “In that day (that is on the day of Pentecost when the Spirit shall come in you), ye shall know that I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you.” When the Holy Spirit came, He made Jesus real to the hearts, the souls, the spirits of all those who had gathered in the upper room; and this same Spirit is doing the same thing today, making Jesus gloriously real.

Jesus was so real, and the disciples were so sure of His reality and that He was God, that they went into the streets to declare the glorious things of God, and the Spirit caused them to speak in various languages the wonderful things of God so that men from different localities and different countries understood them clearly, each in his own language, as they magnified the risen Lord Jesus as God and Christ. Then they went forth under the power of the Spirit to do the works that Jesus had done.

They were commanded to go as witnesses to Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and the uttermost part. Have you ever stopped to think why it was that instead of Peter or some of the disciples dying as the first martyr, the Holy Spirit should have allowed Stephen to gain this crown?

Stephen, you remember, was one of the seven deacons picked to serve tables and distribute the money to the widows; but here God the Spirit has chosen him to die an open death, with his face shining like that of an angel. He gazed into heaven before he died, and saw the Lord Jesus standing to receive him at the right hand of God. Where were the other disciples? Why were they not in Judea, Samaria, and the uttermost part? Was the Holy Spirit grieved? Had they really obeyed the command to go to the uttermost part? Ask yourself why God picked up a deacon like Philip, who was not an apostle, took him as a great evangelist, and then sent him for a particular mission to get the Gospel into Ethiopia. The apostles were seemingly left behind, and God was using this younger man.

God let down a sheet from heaven, showing Peter that he was not to call the Gentiles unclean any more than any Jew, but that the blood of Jesus had been shed for both alike, and that there was now no middle wall of partition. But Peter stayed at Jerusalem with the Jews. It was Philip who was sent; it was Stephen who witnessed; it was Paul and Timothy whom the Lord sent forth to the Gentiles. Ah, it is an awful thing to stand gazing on the home mission field when the Lord has sent us to the uttermost part.

Dean Turnbull of the Nyack Schools in New York, brought a great missionary message to young people last summer at one of the conventions in which he set forth this truth of how the home mission field suffers because the people do not get the foreign missionary vision. Things decay at home because we do not have any outlet sufficiently large abroad to the millions who have never heard.

Nothing gives such fervor and spirit and glory to home missions as a great vision of foreign missions. There is a beautiful depot in most towns. It is kept up and well patronized because the trains run out of it as well as into it. Every home missionary field should be a depot, with trains reaching the uttermost part.