There are many points of view from which we might regard this beautiful incident, but it is with it in its bearing on the person and character of Philip that we are alone at present concerned.  And in considering it further in this light, it may be well to confine ourselves to noticing in what way it gained for Philip his distinctive title of “the Evangelist,” and consequently what it has to teach us still regarding all evangelistic and missionary work.

I.

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.

II.

His Message.

In what does the evangelist’s message consist? “Philip,” we are told, “preached unto him JESUS.”  And what that included we have already seen.  It was the story of the life, and the death, and the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, a new story then, an old story now, but still “the old, old story” for us.

The duty of the Christian teacher must be first of all to proclaim Christ and His salvation, to announce the glad tidings of mercy and of love to sinful men.