nseth from all sin"--this is the
only point from which to start the "Follow Me" life. "Follow Me" does not
mean imitation. It means reincarnation. It's some One coming to re-live
His life in us. He died that His life might be loosed out to be relived in
us.

I have already spoken of this as being a call to friendship. All the rest
that comes is meant to be what naturally grows out of this friendship.
Peter never forgot his last "Follow Me" call. "Lovest thou Me?" Then thou
mayest follow. This greatly sweetens all the rest. It's all for Him!--our
friend. Out of this personal relation comes service, power in service,
suffering because of opposition to Him whom we serve, and joy because we
may suffer on His account.[41]

Matthew became His friend that day down at the little customs-shed at the
Capernaum water edge. And out of that friendship grew our first gospel.
John lived very close, and out of his intimacy came the gospel that
reveals to us most the inner heart of our Lord, and His own intimacy of
relation with the Father. And out of that friendship came, too, not only
John's wonderful little "abiding" epistle,[42] but the Revelation book,
which gives us an inkling of the coming in of the Kingdom time that lies
so near to our Lord's heart. Out of such intimacy of touch grew Stephen's
ringing address before the Jewish council, and--his stormy, stony exit,
out and up into his Master's presence.

And time would fail me to tell of those in every corner of the earth, and
every generation since our Lord was here, who have served and suffered
because they loved Him and followed. Hidden away in the rocks and caves of
France from the fires of persecution, the Huguenots sang their favourite
hymn:

"I have a friend so precious,
So very dear to me,
He loves me with such tender love,
He loves so faithfully.

I could not live apart from Him,
I love to feel Him nigh,
And so we dwell together,
My Lord and I."

When I was in China a year ago, my heart caught some of the distant echoes
of that sort of singing, by Chinese Christians, in the midst of the fiery
persecutions of the Boxer time. And I heard the same sad, glad undertone
last year out in Corea, in the homes we visited, whose loved ones were
behind prison bars for their Friend's sake.

One of the latest chapters of this friendship's outcome is only just
closed in the story of that quiet, young friend of the Lord Jesus, William