As Christian workers, worldliness is not our snare, sin is not our snare, but spiritual wantoning is, viz.: taking the pattern and print of the religious age we live in, making eyes at spiritual success.

Never court anything other than the approval of God, go "without the camp, bearing His reproach." Jesus told the disciples not to rejoice in successful service, and yet this seems to be the one thing in which most of us do rejoice.

We have the commercial view - so many souls saved and sanctified, thank God, now it is alright. Our work begins where God's grace has laid the foundation; we are not to save souls, but to disciple them.

Salvation and sanctification are the work of God's sovereign grace; our work as His disciples is to disciple lives until they are wholly yielded to God.

One life wholly devoted to God is of more value to God than one hundred lives simply awakened by His Spirit.

As workers for God we must reproduce our own kind spiritually, and that will be God's witness to us as workers.

God brings us to a standard of life by His grace, and we are responsible for reproducing that standard in others.

Unless the worker lives a life hidden with Christ in God, he is apt to become an irritating dictator instead of an indwelling disciple.

Many of us are dictators, we dictate to people and to meetings. Jesus never dictates to us in that way.

Whenever Our Lord talked about discipleship, He always prefaced it with an "IF," never with an emphatic assertion - "You must." Discipleship carries an option with it.

These words are not spoken as a rebuke, nor even with surprise; Jesus is leading Philip on.

The last One with whom we get intimate is Jesus.

Before Pentecost the disciples knew Jesus as the One Who gave them power to conquer demons and to bring about a revival (see Luke 10:18-20).

It was a wonderful intimacy, but there was a much closer intimacy to come - "I have called you friends." Friendship is rare on earth. It means identity in thought and heart and spirit.

The whole discipline of life is to enable us to enter into this closest relationship with Jesus Christ.

We receive His blessings and know His word, but do we know Him?

Jesus said, "It is expedient for you that I go away" - in that relationship, so that He might lead them on.

It is a joy to Jesus when a disciple takes time to step more intimately with Him.

Fruit bearing is always mentioned as the manifestation of an intimate union with Jesus Christ (John 15:1-4).

When once we get intimate with Jesus we are never lonely, we never need sympathy, we can pour out all the time without being pathetic.

The saint who is intimate with Jesus will never leave impressions of himself, but only the impression that Jesus is having unhindered way, because the last abyss of his nature has been satisfied by Jesus.

The only impression left by such a life is that of the strong calm sanity that Our Lord gives to those who are intimate with Him.

Jesus Christ says, in effect, Don't rejoice in successful service, but rejoice because you are rightly related to Me.

The snare in Christian work is to rejoice in successful service, to rejoice in the fact that God has used you.

You never can measure what God will do through you if you are rightly related to Jesus Christ.

Keep your relationship right with Him, then whatever circumstances you are in, and whoever you meet day by day, He is pouring rivers of living water through you, and it is of His mercy that He does not let you know it.

When once you are rightly related to God by salvation and sanctification, remember that wherever you are, you are put there by God; and by the reaction of your life on the circumstances around you, you will fulfil God's purpose, as long as you keep in the light as God is in the light.

The tendency to-day is to put the emphasis on service.

Beware of the people who make usefulness their ground of appeal.

If you make usefulness the test, then Jesus Christ was the greatest failure that ever lived.

The lodestar of the saint is God Himself, not estimated usefulness.

It is the work that God does through us that counts, not what we do for Him.

All that Our Lord heeds in a man's life is the relationship of worth to His Father.

Jesus is bringing many sons to glory.