“We need to he reminded, in days like the present, that every child of God, every member of the body of Christ, whatever be his position or sphere of action, has a mission to fulfil — a work to do for Christ. He may not be called to be an evangelist, a pastor, or a teacher: but he is called to live Christ — to represent Him — to be a channel of communication between His loving heart and every form of need, in this poor dark, cold, selfish world. This is the Christian’s mission: may every Christian seek to fulfil it!”
“Yes, He was here, and, of course, He could at once, and directly, have met the need without calling His poor unbelieving and self-occupied disciples into the scene at all. He could have summoned angelic messengers from Heaven to wait upon those hungry thousands. But He did neither the one nor the other, because it was His gracious purpose to use His disciples as channels of communication between Himself and that vast hungry multitude. Not merely as instruments of His power, which angels might be, but the very expression of His heart.“
“If I get my hands full of means, before my heart is full of Christ, I shall not use the means for Him, I shall use them for my own glory, and not for the glory of God.”
“It is a grand point to have the heart impressed with the fact, that we are called to be channels through which the heart of Christ may flow out to His own, and to a needy world. It is wonderful, it seems too good to be true; but, blessed be God, it is as true as it is wonderful. Let us only seek to take it in — to believe it, to make it our own. Let us not content ourselves with admiring it as a beautiful theory, but seek to have it wrought into our souls by the mighty power of the Holy Spirit.”
“If we want to act as the channels of the grace of Christ, we must have to do with Him in the deep secret of our own souls. We must learn of Him; we must feed upon Him; we must know the meaning of communion with His heart; we must be near enough to Him to know the secrets of His mind, and carry out the purposes of His love. If we would reflect Him, we must gaze upon Him. If we would reproduce Him, we must feed upon Him, we must have Him dwelling in our hearts by faith. We may depend upon it, that what is really in our hearts will come out in our lives. We may have a quantity of truth in our heads, and flippantly flowing from our lips, but if we really desire to be channels of communication between His heart and the needy ones in the scene through which we are passing, we must habitually drink into His love. It cannot possibly be in any other way. “He that believes on Me, as the Scripture has said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water” (John 8:38).”
“We long to see every member of the body of Christ acting as a channel through which His precious grace may flow out in living streams to all around, shedding freshness and verdure in its course — and not a stagnant pool, so strikingly illustrative of a Christian out of communion.”
- C. H. Mackintosh, 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝐶ℎ𝑟𝑖𝑠𝑡𝑖𝑎𝑛’𝑠 𝑀𝑖𝑠𝑠𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝐴𝑛𝑑 𝐻𝑜𝑤 𝑇𝑜 𝐹𝑢𝑙𝑓𝑖𝑙 𝐼𝑡 , 𝑀𝑖𝑠𝑐𝑒𝑙𝑙𝑎𝑛𝑒𝑜𝑢𝑠 𝑊𝑟𝑖𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑔𝑠 𝑜𝑓 𝐶. 𝐻. 𝑀., 𝑉𝑜𝑙. 𝑉, (New York, NY: Loizeaux Brothers, 1898/1945).
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