all who have Christ's work in hand; for the parent, master, and mistress. You have also to be taught by the text a great lesson, to work hard and steadily, and yet to cease from your work. When your work is done zealously, faithfully done to the utmost of your power, and then left with Christ, to be taken into His work, and used by Him as seemeth him best; to succeed or not to succeed; so that His will be done, and His work go forward: then you know something of what it is that is meant. He that is entered into his rest, he also hath ceased from his own works. There can be no rest so long as you miserably fret yourselves with thinking, it is my work which does it all. I must put so much strain and stress upon myself, to make myself worthy that Christ should work through me.

This is just what the text forbids. Our works standing alone are dead and barren. The Pharisees abounded in outward good works. Yet what was our Lord's judgment of the mass of them. Every plant which my heavenly Father hath not planted shall be rooted up. God was not truly and really the principle of their life, but poor miserable nature, toward which all their love and striving and aspirations were directed, notwithstanding abundance and fervour of religious exercises. Not a work is lost which is done in Christ.

The finished work of Christ, empowering, quickening, vitalizing them, this must we rest upon, so as to be able to say, surely my work is with the Lord,† begun, continued, and ended in Him. I will go on and do my best; and will wait upon Him who hath said, "In me is thy fruit found," and in whom are all my fresh springs.

Of this only you are sure, that no talent honestly and *Matt. xv. 13. + Hos. xiv. 8.

+ Isa. xlix. 4.

118 CHRIST'S REST, AND HIS PEOPLE'S REST IN HIM.

conscientiously laid out will be lost; never will it turn out to have been thrown away. You may and do throw yourselves away when you live for this world, but never what is employed for Christ. But you must be content to wait to know how this is; it will come out clear as noonday when God's mystery concerning His servants is accomplished. Meanwhile, sow beside all waters. Let him that plougheth plough in hope.†

Break up your fallow ground, and sow not among thorns. The swallows wheeling their flight and coursing each other about our homes, prepare for their autumn journey; they know the times; their God teaches them their appointed seasons; they know them and they use them. May He teach you the priceless value of time present; and lead you to take your lamps in hand at once, and go forth to meet the Bridegroom. "Time past is not; time future may not be ;

Time present is the only time for thee."

* Isa. xxxii. 20.

+ I Cor. ix. 1O.

Jer. iv. 3.

VIII.

The Indwelling Spirit, and the Body's Redemption.

ROM. viii. II.

"But if the Spirit of Him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you, He that raised up Christ from the dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies by His Spirit that dwelleth in you."

You will observe a difference between the manner in which the flesh and the body are spoken of in the New Testament. While all, or nearly all, that is said of the flesh is also said of the body, yet there is that spoken of the body which cannot be spoken of the flesh.

Both are called mortal and perishable, as "all flesh is grass; "* so in the text, "your mortal bodies;" and in chap. vii., "the body of this death."

In Rom. vi. the body is called "the body of sin;” as the flesh is called "sinful in Rom. viii., and in various other Epistles. "God sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh."†

Weakness is attributed to "the flesh," hurniliation to "the body." "The flesh is weak." "He shall change the body of our humiliation." E.V. "our vile body."

Thus to both flesh and body, weakness and humiliation, corruption, decay, and death are attributed in common. These and other attributes are almost Phil. iii. 21.

* Isa. xl. 6. + Rom. viii. 3.

indifferently assigned to both, yet more emphatically and frequently to the flesh than to the body.

For indeed there are greater things said of the body than could be said of the flesh; glorious hopes and prospects belonging to the destiny of the one, which we are not allowed to connect with the other. We wait for "the redemption of the body." "The body is for the Lord, and the Lord for the body." "Your bodies are the temples of the Holy Ghost, the members of Christ."+"He shall change our vile body." Such words are not spoken of the flesh; but rather, "Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God."

If we look at the close of the 7th chapter, we find the sorrowful lamentation of the converted and renewed man; his sighing and yearning after deliverance from the body's load, from the weary conflict with corruption. A great writer has observed reasonably that it cannot refer to the unconverted man; because such an one has his inner self in agreement with the sinful ungodly state. Estrangement from God is the habit of his soul. He says to God, “Depart from us: we desire not the knowledge of Thy ways."§ With the converted man it is different. His whole soul goes along with the law of God. Sin is the object of his intense and continual loathing. God's commandments are not grievous to him. In being reminded of them, in obeying them, no sense of thraldom and bondage oppresses him. Only the corruption of the nature, so far as it remains even in them that are regenerate, and is not yet wholly eradicated and brought under the power and mastery of the spirit, hangs as an intolerable load, like a chain clanking and draggling at the heel of one who *Rom. viii. 23. ‡ 1 Cor. xv 50. t1 Cor. vi. 13, 15, 19. § Job xxi. 14.

is yet escaped himself from the prison and has already the pledge and earnest of complete deliverance, of losing the last remnant of bondage.

To the plaint and wail of the Apostle there is a brief but complete answer returned; yea, he returns answer to himself. "I thank God," or "the grace of God, through Jesus Christ our Lord." This is the summary of the substance of all that is to follow. He who can say from the heart that much has all the rest in germ. Thus much known, confessed, embraced, is more than flesh and blood can reveal; for "no man can say that Jesus is the Lord, but by the Holy Ghost." And the great chapter that follows is the full, orderly, triumphant unfolding of all the steps of that glorious liberty which is enjoyed by the children of God. St. Paul must needs have pourtrayed the wretchedness and degradation of the bondage, that he may afterwards declare the gladness and exultation of the liberty; the swallowing up of mortality by life.

For this is one of the wonderful and original thoughts of the Gospel; a thought very much present to St. Paul, and which it was given him to see with special clearness; that liberty and life are one; and that without the life of God and Christ, wrought by the Holy Spirit in the heart, there may be much boast and pretence of liberty; great talk and shout about liberty; but it is sham and delusion and emptiness! True liberty comes, the Apostle shows in this chapter, of the joint working of the Holy, Blessed, and Glorious Trinity. It is not artificially prepared; it is not of the construction of human statesmen, politicians, and wouldbe regenerators and enlighteners of mankind. The very first beginning of this true liberty is where, ac* I Cor. xii. 3.