The Pattern Worker

We cannot read the Four Gospels, in which the Spirit, through the four Evangelists, sets before us the activities of the Lord throughout the period of His public life and service, without being impressed with how fully all His days and hours were filled, in His “Father’s business.” Serving and giving filled up each day. There was no loitering in His path. His activities, in the midst of human woe and need, were ceaseless. He sought no ease, no relaxation for Himself. When He retired to a “desert place,” it was to have converse with His disciples, apart from the multitude. If He sought the solitudes of Olivet and Gethsemane, it was to pray. When He went into company, whether the crowd without, or the social circle within, as Luke 7:36, it was to meet with sinners and win them to God.

His remaining in one place or His going to another, was not determined by ease or comfort, or from love of friendship and society, but wholly at His Father’s call, and in furtherance of His work. Hungered Himself, He feeds the multitude, working a miracle to meet their need, but never for His own. Perfect in all His works and ways, Jehovah’s pattern Servant, as well as His obedient Son, He stands before us without equal, our Examplar to be copied, as well as our Lord to be obeyed.

The service of all who work in His Name and for His kingdom is to be after the pattern He has left to be followed. The tendency is to copy others, good men it may be, but liable to err. And to repeat their foibles and frailties is easier than to excel their virtues. Occupation with Christ, tracing His steps, hearkening to His Word, taking our directions direct from Himself, gives not only the right pattern, but power to reproduce it, in some measure at least.

The Perfect Servant has had His reward. Ours is yet to come. And it will be, when it does come, according to the measure in which we have conformed and ordered our service after the example He left us, and according to the Word He has given us. This is especially “truth in season” for the saints and servants of God of this hour. There is an ever-growing tendency to engage in the Lord’s work in ways that the Lord left us no pattern of, and gives no directions in His Holy Word, to follow ways that in many instances are neither according to the spirit or principles of Scripture, ways copied from the world—borrowed from their religious systems—and supposed to be an improvement on “the right way of the Lord.”

But God honours His own designs, and not the distortions of them, created after man’s device. The Holy Spirit honours the Pattern given by Him in the Word. And as the path of the Perfect Servant was always well-pleasing to God, because it was always according to the Father’s will (John 8:29), so will be the path of the Lord’s servant who sets the Lord always before him (Ps. 16:8), and seeks to pursue his way steadfastly, according to the Word of God and the example of Christ.

To follow Thee, in Thy blest path,

To serve in Thine own way,

Be this our aim, our daily joy,

In our brief service-day.

J.Ri.

Article series: Our Glorious Lord