The Evangelist.
With regard to the evangelist himself, one truth stands out clearly
from the whole narrative, his work is _given_ to him to do. He is
first and foremost a missionary, one sent.
It is a pity, perhaps, that in our ordinary speech, we have come to
limit the name "missionary" so much to the man who carries the gospel
abroad. No doubt he is a missionary in the highest sense of the word;
but still the fundamental idea in every minister or evangelist's
position is the idea of one sent--sent for a particular purpose, with a
particular message to proclaim wherever God may place him. He has no
power, no authority of his own. All that he has comes from Him whose
servant he is, and whose truth he has to announce.
You remember--to appeal at once to the highest example--how
ever-present this thought of His mission was to the mind of our Lord
and Master. His meat, so He told His disciples, was to do the will of
Him that sent Him (John iv. 34). The word which He spake was not His
own, but the Father's who sent Him (John xiv. 24). And so when the
time came for His sending forth His disciples to carry on His work, it
was as "Apostles," those sent, that the work was entrusted to them; and
in the same spirit He prayed for them in His great intercessory prayer:
"_As Thou didst send Me into the world, even so sent I them into the
world_" (John xvii. 18).
If we keep this view of the evangelist as the missionary, ever before
us, there is one fact regarding his position we can never lose sight
of. He has no new truth of his own to declare, no new theories of his
own to frame. The message which he has to deliver is not his own, but
God's; and it must be his constant endeavour to learn that message for
himself, and then, as God's servant, to announce it to others. Men may
receive his message. If they do not, he dare not substitute any other.