HERALDS OF GOD
with heaven, can never be intimidated by the world. You will remember how the same note sounds again in Paul's account of his conversion. "Who art Thou, Lord?" "I am Jesus whom thou persecutes. SBut rise, and stand upon thy feet: for I have appeared unto thee for this purpose, to make thee a minister." It is always thus in every age the ministers of the living Christ are made—the crashing, paralysing sense of abject worthlessness, the self-esteem broken and rolled in the dust, and then a man rising to his full stature as God's commissioned messenger. "Chief of sinners," "least of all saints"—such was Paul's self-estimate; yet with what royal, unqualified authority he proclaimed the word and the will of the Lord!
The Christian preacher is the bondslave of Christ and the servant of all: but let him not confound such apostolic servitude with spiritual servility. The Gospel is not servile: it is "mighty through God to the pulling down of strongholds." Dr. G. L. Prestige, in his biography of the late Bishop Gore, has described a sermon Gore preached before the University of Oxford, in which he sought to distinguish between true humility and false deference. "Some who heard it long recalled the trumpet tones and accompanying snorts of derision with which he quoted the Magnificat, interspersing each passage with contemptuous cries of 'Servile?'" "Stand upon thy feet," said the voice to Saul of Tarsus, "for I will make thee a minister, delivering thee from the people": for to have stood before Christ is to be clothed with an authority that defies subservience and
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