The Lord wants to preserve a line, the Seed of Himself, and He must have an instrument raised up, but His dealings with that instrument are very strange. John the Baptist, the man who proclaimed the Messiah, had his faith tested. We do not know what Paul’s tests of faith were in that prison. Doubtless he had his dark days – “only Luke is with me”, and so on. Faith tested, but what a purpose served. What we owe to that! Has not the Lord through that very ministry and through that very servant done more to secure His church in the succeeding generations than by any other means? When the church is completed and in the glory, the instrumentality of the Lord above all others, will be Paul and his letters. But those very things by which the church has been mostly secured, those letters born out of the imprisonment, suffering, and the reducing of that man, is the way of the Lord. Strange ways, but mighty. His ways are past finding out. And Benjamin who was the instrument linking the distant brethren afar off with the one exalted, he fulfilled his ministry by way of the cup. To use the words of another Benjamite, Paul himself of the tribe of Benjamin, “That I may know Him… and the fellowship of His sufferings.” That is taking the cup, Benjamin’s cup, but it is to bring nigh those who are afar off. It is a ministry, a wonderful ministry…… A brother came back to me from a great convention in the States and I asked him what kind of a time they had. He did not seem very satisfied and was telling me something of what had been said, and I happened to remark “Well brother, it is only the Lord that can satisfy.” He replied, “Oh, that is it; the fact of the matter is we run to feed on prophecy and we have lost the Lord.” He could have put it in another way, a simpler presentation of the same truth. We have said this before very often: we can be so occupied with the Second Coming that we may lose altogether the One who is coming. It is not the Second Coming, it is the One who is coming, and there are multitudes of good, earnest, evangelical people so taken up with the signs of the times, but the One who is coming is not all their thought, and today it is like that. It is things, the work, enthusiasms, enterprises, organisations, programmes, all these, so much occupying time and resources and the Lord takes a second place. It is a disappointing situation, but as one looks out and is in touch with this situation, one just feels this burden, that the Lord must get something more than this, He must have something more than this among His people. And one looks back into the Word and sees that is just what the Lord is after.