Surely if Jesus could give everything He had, she could do no less. And so in 1895, Amy Carmichael embraced an unusual mission, one that would last for the remaining 56 years of her life. The Dohnavur Fellowship would become, under her loving guidance, a place of sanctuary for more than one thousand children who would otherwise have faced a bleak future.
Amy Carmichael’s service for God also extended to the printed page, as she wrote nearly three dozen Christian books. Her life was characterised by obedience, total commitment, and selflessness and serves as an example to us today.
The following is an extract from her book entitled ‘IF’.
No vision of the night can show, no word declare with what longings of love Divine Love waits till the heart, all weary and sick of itself, turns to its Lord and says, "Take full possession." There is no need to plead that the love of God shall fill our heart as though He were unwilling to fill us: He is willing as light is willing to flood a room that is opened to its brightness; willing as water is willing to flow into an emptied channel. Love is pressing us on all sides like air. Cease to resist, and instantly love takes possession. As the 15th century poem Quia amore langues says:
Long and love thou never so high,
My love is more than thine may be.
More, far more. For as His abundance of pardon passes our power to tell it, so does His abundance of love: it is as far as the East is from the West, high as the heaven is above the earth. But words fail: Love soars above them all.
To look at ourselves leads to despair. Thank God, the Blood cleanseth.
If thou be foul, I shall make thee clean,
If thou be sick, I shall thee heal.
Foundest thou ever love so leal?
Never, Lord, never.
SOMETIMES, when we are distressed by past failure and tormented by fear of failure should we again set our faces toward Jerusalem, nothing helps so much as to give some familiar Scripture time to enter into us and become part of our being. The words ‘Grace for grace’ have been a help to me since I read in a little old book of Bishop Moule’s something that opened their meaning. (Till then I had not understood them.)
He says ‘for’ means simply ‘instead.’ The image is of a perpetual succession of supply; a displacement ever going on; ceaseless changes of need and demand.
‘The picture before us is as of a river. Stand on its banks, and contemplate the flow of waters. A minute passes, and another. Is it the same stream still? Yes. But is it the same water? No. The liquid mass that passed you a few seconds ago fills now another section of the channel; new water has displaced it, or if you please replaced it; water instead of water. And so hour by hour, and year by year, and century by century, the process holds; one stream, other waters, living not stagnant, because always in the great identity there is perpetual exchange. Grace takes the place of grace.’ (Love takes the place of love) ‘ever new, ever old, ever the same, ever fresh and young, for hour by hour, for year by year, through Christ.’
There is no force strong enough to hold us together as a company, and animate all our doings, but this one force of Love; and so there is a constant attack upon the love without which we are sounding brass and tinkling cymbal.
That explains why every now and then those who want to live the life of love seem to be constrained to seek the searching and the cleansing of the Spirit of God, first (it has often happened so) in the secret of our own hearts, and then together; and we know how graciously God has answered us, so that though our word must always be, ‘not as though I had already attained,’ we do, by His enabling, press on.
There is another reason why the adversary attacks love. It is this: Far out on our uttermost rim a thing may occur which is the reflection, so to speak, of something that was nourished in the heart of one who is in the very centre. I have always known it to be so. Perhaps it was never expressed in act or word, the eye did not see it, the ear did not hear it. But spiritual influences move where sight and hearing have no place; and unloved in any one of us, or even an absence of the quality of love of which we have been thinking, is enough to cause the slow stain to spread till it reaches some soul in a moment of weakness. And irreparable damage may result.
O Lord, forgive: Thy property is always to have mercy. Give me the comfort of Thy help again. Let it be Thy pleasure to deliver me, O Lord my God.
If, in dealing with one who does not respond, I weary of the strain, and slip from under the burden, then I know nothing of Calvary love.
If I am soft to myself and slide comfortably into the vice of self-pity and self-sympathy; if I do not by the grace of God practise fortitude, then I know nothing of Calvary love.
If I covet any place on earth but the dust at the foot of the Cross, then I know nothing of Calvary love.
If I am afraid to speak the truth, lest I lose affection, or lest the one concerned should say, ’You do not understand,’ or because I fear to lose my reputation for kindness; if I put my own good name before the other’s highest good, then I know nothing of Calvary love.
That which I know not, teach Thou me, O Lord, my God. |
