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"That I may rejoice in the day of Christ, that I have not run in vain, neither laboured in vain. Yea, and if I be offered upon the sacrifice and service of your faith, I joy and rejoice with you all. For the same cause also do ye joy, and rejoice with me."-Philippians ii., 16, 17, and 18.

WE Come here to another of the passages so frequent in this letter, in which Paul pours out his whole heart to his beloved church. Perhaps there was never a Christian teacher, always excepting Christ, who spoke so much about himself as Paul did. His personal experience was always ready at hand for the illustration of what he was saying. As I have already had occasion to remark, we may even say that Paul's gospel was but the generalisation of Paul's history. He had felt it all before by inspiration he cast it into the form of doctrine, and so his own example was ever ready for correction and instruction in righteousness. It is very difficult to keep that sort of thing from becoming egotism, but he never overpasses that line. The warmth of his affection and the noble simplicity of his nature always preserve him from that. Here we have him opening the very depths of his heart in a way which a less noble and fervid nature would have shrunk from, and expressing his absolute consecration to his work, and his great desire for their spiritual good, with such force as would have been in the case of most men gross exaggeration. There must have been a very strong bond of love between a man and a body of Christian converts before he could use the thought that their faithfulness would increase his joy in the judgment, as a motive with them for being faithful; and there must have been a very strong bond of love between a man and a Christian church before he could say to them, with any expectation of being believed, "If I have to die in order to help you, I shall be glad to do it; and I expect that you will rejoice also with me."

If we look at the words before us, these two ideas are the two main thoughts in them-the help which their faith would be to him in the last great day; and the help which his death might be to them in the hour of his offering. And I take these ideas mainly to deal with this morning; beginning first with that thought—a singular thought that * A Sermon preached in Union Chapel, Manchester, on Sunday morning, Dec. 18th, 1874. VOL. LXXVII.-NEW SERIES, No. 61.

is brought before us here, singular in itself, and even more singular in its place, as being a motive to Christian faithfulness-that their Christian growth and progress, their being what he has asked them to be, "blameless and harmless as the sons of God, without rebuke," would be a help to Paul when he came to stand before the throne of God. "That I may rejoice," or, as the words might be more accurately rendered, for a subject of glory to me, "against the day of Christ, that I have not run in vain, neither laboured in vain."

Now let us look at that thought. The first thing to mark, of course, is the way in which that great thought of the Day-the Day, as the time which was to test his work-was always before the apostle; it gleamed there upon his horizon constantly; it was ever present with him. I have to stand before God and give my account of my stewardship, and therefore I must labour; and constantly, with an elevation of spirit above all personal concerns, he lived for the one thing that his hands might be clear from the blood of all men when he should come to stand before Christ.

Dear brethren, that applies not only to apostles and to preachers, but to you and me. With no slavish fear, yet Christian men ought ever to live as in the irradiation by anticipation of the brightness of the light that gleams out from that great white throne. We shall stand there. But let us carry it with us as we go through life, so that it may burn up all the triviality of our common concerns, all the monotony of our daily deeds; and that we may feel how solemn, how awful, how great is everything that a Christian soul does, because it has all to be done over again, as it were, there in the presence of the all-judging eye and the perfect vision of God.

Well, then, the next consideration that I would suggest to you is this principle involved here-that by the results of that testing day the position of Paul and of every Christian man, in a very real sense, will be determined. I am not going to enter into questions which would take far more space than we can spare for them this morning, to deal with them adequately, namely, the perfect coincidence of the two streams of representation which appear in Scripture as to the principle upon which the eternal condition of the souls of saved men is determined. On the one hand, and fundamentally, to all there is the great principle that whosoever enters into heaven, and is saved with the everlasting salvation, and meets and passes the judgment of that great day, does so purely and solely as the gift of God for the sake of Christ, comprehended by faith. That is the one basis of all. No man enters heaven because he deserves it. No man's work has anything to do with his acceptance; but only his faith and Christ's work become his by his faith.

And then, on the other side, there comes in the other stream of representation, as common in Scripture as the former, which declares that men-saved by grace through faith, and that not of themselves, but as the gift of God in Christ,—that these men take a place in the heavens, according to the extent to which their faith has been wrought out in their character and in their lives. And I maintain that these two things are perfectly consistent and harmonious; at all events-for I cannot enter upon that subject at any length now-I want you to

THE PREACHER'S JOY.

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remember that the two representations lie side by side in Scripture, and that you have not got hold of the comprehensive and entire doctrine unless you have both of them-first, all for Christ's sake, all for His work, all by His merit, all through faith; and then according to the extent to which my faith, working by love, has permeated my character and been manifest in my life, is the place that 1 take there. And of that determining fact, one large element, though by no means the only one, is that which the apostle points to here with such emphasis-the work of a Christian man, especially of a man whose mission it is to do such work for Christ, will determine, amongst the other elements, the degree of his glory and the place where he stands. Paul seems to say that if these Philippian believers were to become apostate, or were to present but a poor, shrivelled, imperfect Christianity, it would be so much the worse for him at last. And it seems that their growth in holiness, the consistency of their lives, the advancement of their Christian character, would be an element in his joy, and would have something to do with the place in which he would stand. Of course, we must not so push this thought as to say that unless a man's work is successful, it will be no element in his future blessedness. Thank God, the principle remains true, "Though Israel be not gathered, yet shall I be glorious in the eyes of my God." And if a man's work hath been, and in the measure in which it has been faithful and humble and earnest and simple, the issues of it will have nothing to do with the brightness of his crown and the place of his future. But we can so seldom be sure that our work would not have been more successful if we had been more prayerful; so seldom be sure that our work would not have had larger results if it had been accompanied with more self-forgetfulness, with more watchfulness, with more tears, with more simplicity, with more faithfulness, with more prayers, with more perseverance, that on the whole we may say that futile Christian work has been faithless Christian work; and faithless Christian work will add nothing to a man's blessedness, and be no element in his glory.

Dear brethren, I believe that in the broad view and in the long run, speaking generally, there is no service for God which fails of its effect, except by reason, amongst other reasons, of defect on the part of the doer, either in the spirit or the manner or the substance of the service; and therefore, though admitting that not the results but the spirit will determine the extent to which any Christian man's work can be supposed to be a part of his crown and his glory; the two things are so inseparably connected in the general, that we may say the success does measure and indicate the spirit; and therefore, if a man hath laboured in vain, he will lose some of the glory in the day of the Lord.

And I need not remind you, I suppose, how frequently this thought crops up in all forms in the New Testament. The solemn words that we were reading together this morning, though they be susceptible of a much wider application, yet in their original meaning did apply specifically to this subject. "The foundation is laid." A Christian man, by his efforts for the salvation of others—a preacher and an apostle in the case in hand, but the principle applies far more widely, builds upon that foundation, "gold, silver, precious stones, or, wood, hay, stubble;" the two categories both apply to the character of the converts; the

"gold, silver, the precious stones," is faithful work done for Christ, which has been successful in bringing men to build upon that foundation; the "wood, the hay, the stubble," is careless, perfunctory, useless work for Christ, which has brought nothing on to foundation that is not destroyed at that last day. And, says Paul, the man who has done the one is saved, and has the reward; and the man who has done the other, it is all burnt up before his eyes, and he is saved, yet so as by fire.

Christian workers! you have a solemn warning in these words. Take care than you are building on the Foundation. You, teachers, in your classes; you, fathers and mothers, in your households; you, men and women, who speak to others; any of you who open your lips in public, take care that what you build on the foundation be not the wood, the hay, the stubble, that will be all blackened and grimed and scorched and annihilated, twisting up and crackling into nothingness in the revealing fire; but will be the gold and the silver and the precious stones, that shall gleam more brightly and flash more lustrously as the tongued flames play upon them and reveal their brightness and their preciousness. Think of a man-and it is the case of multitudeswhose own personal salvation is secure because he had a personal faith, weak and tremulous it may be, but yet real, going into the heavens there, if I might so say, with his eyebrows burnt off, and the smell of fire upon his limbs, and nothing to show for all the life that he had lived, because it was all burnt up in that fire! And think of the other man, to whom an entrance is ministered abundantly into the everlasting kingdom of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ-"They rest from their labours, and their works do follow them."

Then, dear friends, without dwelling longer on this point, or urging how such a principle, standing in connection as it does, indicates not only Paul's warm love for this people, as if even among the glories of heaven he would miss something if he had not the joy of knowing that his work for them had not been in vain; and how, on the other side, its use as a motive in such a connection indicates the pre-supposition of much true, warm affection on their parts, else they would never have felt that it was any motive to them for faithfulness that thereby they should help the apostle-may I not venture to make a wider application of the whole thing, and to ask you, first of all-if I may so far venture upon personal considerations,-ask you first of all, and ask myself too, to try and get the spirit of these thoughts into our relation to one another, which I don't venture to parallel with the apostle, but which presents in it enough that is similar and analogous to make these thoughts appropriate. For me the lesson is to preach and work as having ever before me that great solemn day of accountThey watch for souls as they that must give account." O if I have here this morning any of my brethren in the ministry, dear friends, how is our pride of our poor work, our prayerlessness, our carelessness of fruit when we have done our poor talk, how all that is rebuked and smitten into dust by such an example as this. And for you, dear brethren, does such a pure, simple bond of love knit us together as that I can say, "I feel as if I should want something if I stood yonder and these were not there" and do you feel as if my saying to you "that I may rejoice in the day of Christ that I have not run in vain, neither laboured in vain," was any motive for faithfulness in your Christian career? "Look to

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