Scripture: "La, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world"— MATT, xxviii. 20.
When the Lord chose His twelve disciples, it was "that they should be with Him, and that He might send them forth to preach" (Mark Hi. 14). A life in fellowship with Himself was to be their preparation and their fitness for the work of preaching.
So deeply were the disciples conscious of this having been their great privilege, that when Christ spoke of His leaving them to go to the Father, their hearts were filled with great sorrow. The presence of Christ had become indispensable to them; they could not think of living without Him. To comfort them, Christ gave them the promise of the Holy Spirit, with the assurance that they then would have Himself in His heavenly presence, in a sense far deeper and more intimate than they ever had known on earth. The law of their first vocation remained unchanged: to be with Him, to live in unbroken fellowship with Him, would be the secret of power to preach and to testify of Him.
When Christ gave them the Great Commission to go into all the world and to preach the Gospel to every creature, He added the words: "Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world."
For all time the principle is to hold good for all His servants that without the experience of His presence ever abiding with them, their preaching would have no power. The secret of their strength would be the living testimony that Jesus Christ was every moment with them, inspiring and directing and strengthening them. It was this that made them so bold in preaching Him as the Crucified One in the midst of His enemies. They never for a moment regretted His bodily absence; they had Him with them, and in them, in the divine power of the Holy Spirit.
In all the work of the minister and the missionary, everything depends on the consciousness, through a living faith, of the abiding presence of the Lord with His servant, the living experience of the presence of Jesus as an essential element in preaching the Gospel. If this be clouded, work becomes a human effort, without the freshness and the power of the heavenly life. And nothing can bring back the power and the blessing but a return to the Master's feet, for Him to breathe into the heart, in divine power. His blessed word: "Lo, I am with you alway!"
