Day Fourteen: Excerpt from God’s Missionary by Amy Carmichael

One of those people who have shaped me the most has been Amy Carmichael. Her life and writings continue to speak to believers around the world. Amy was a radical. She saw no room for compromise in her life or the lives of those she worked with.

On that subject, she wrote a book called God’s Missionary, a reflection on the mission given to the people of God. Today, I just want to share an excerpt from that book.

“Comrades in this solemn fight--- this awful conflict with awful powers--- let us settle it as something that cannot be shaken: we are here to live holy, loving, lowly lives.

We cannot do this unless we walk very, very, close to our Lord Jesus. Anything that would hinder us from the closest walk that is possible to us till we see Him face to face is not for us. We need to be sensitive to the first approach of the hindering thing. For the sake of the souls that may be stumbled if we turn even ever so little aside, for the sake our Master’s glory—dearer surely to us than all else—let us ask Him now to show us weather in anywise we have been showing others, “crooked patterns.”

We are to know nothing among any save Jesus Christ and Him crucified.

For our calling, by its very nature, calls us apart from everything else; it has for its object nothing less than this: the showing of Christ, the living of Christ, among those who do not know Him. The love of our God must shine through us unhindered if we would live to Him here. Surely, whatever makes for holiness of life, for the clearing of the glass through which the light shines, this is for us and nothing else.

“I do not think there is anything so essential to real service for God… as an entire separation and devotion to the work.” Thus speaks Arnot of Central Africa. Thus speaks every man and woman who life has made more than a passing flicker in the spiritual realm. Whether among our fellow-country-men or the people of the earth, it is the life that has no time for trifling that tells us...

Ours should be the love that asks not “how little?” but “How much?”; the love that pours out its all and revels in the joy of having anything to pour on the feet of its Beloved; love that laughs at limits--- rather, does not see them and would not heed them if it did.

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