Power Is in the Current.


The word to emphasize here is _control_. You will find new meanings, that
you had not thought of, gradually working out of it. If the Holy Spirit
had control of us as He had of--Philip, for instance. He picked Philip up
out of the midst of the Samaritan crowd, where he was the human centre of
things, and put him down away off here in the desert,--_strange
contrast!_--and with one lone traveller, greater contrast yet![59] If He
were free to pick you and me up like that, out of these surroundings,
congenial and pleasant, and set us down where we had no thought of going,
and never would have gone of our own choice, and we sing as we are picked
up, _and_ keep on singing where we find ourselves amidst the uncongenial
perhaps, the strange, the unprecedented and hard,--_if_ He were free to
control like that these days, there would be a present-day Pentecost
beside which the Acts-Pentecost was but the beginnings of the throbbings
of power.

There are some peculiarities of this "Follow Me" road here. There comes a
strangely new sense of proportion. As you follow close up behind the Man
ahead, you will grow _smaller_, and He will grow _larger_. No, that's not
an accurate statement; you won't _grow_ any smaller, you will only find
out how small you are. He won't grow any larger, you will simply be
finding out, and then finding out more, how large He is. It'll seem
strange to most of us, finding out our real size, or lack of the size we
always supposed we were. But it will come with a great awing,
heart-subduing sense, to find how marvellous in size this great Man is;
and yet He is our brother, as well as so immensely more.

You come to find out that power, that thing that used to be so much talked